354 MORE POT-POURRI 



An old friend, to whom I had written of my love of 

 the early Tuscan painters when I was at Florence as a 

 girl of twenty, answered me as follows, and I suppose 

 many would agree with him : 



' The modern taste for the very early Florentine 

 masters must, I think, be an acquired one, and though in 

 your own case it may have seemed spontaneous I doubt 

 whether any intellectual taste or tendency is wholly self- 

 formed in the case of a girl of nineteen. At that impres- 

 sionable age living in a mental atmosphere congenial to 

 it, you with your quick receptive temperament probably 

 imbibed from those around you, whose opinions on art 

 were entitled to your respect, and without any conscious 

 effort or critical process of your own, that sentiment 

 about the early Florentine masters to which the writings 

 of Buskin had already given so strong an impulse, and 

 which was then the pervading sentiment of connoisseurs 

 and persons interested in pictorial art. Perugino is the 

 earliest master in whose works I can find Beauty a 

 quality essential to my enjoyment of Art as such. The 

 earlier masters, Giotto, Cimabue, Taddeo Gaddi, Masaccio, 

 Lippo Lippi, etc., seem to me only interesting.' 



With regard to Botticelli I feel that he alone perhaps 

 among the Tuscans strikes the note which Berenson 

 alludes to in the following passage from his 'Venetian 

 Painters,' and I like to feel that Berenson's optimism 

 about modern art and life is true : 



' Indeed, not the least attraction of the Venetian 

 masters is their note of modernity, by which I mean the 

 feeling they give us that they were on the high road to 

 the art of to-day. We have seen how on two separate 

 occasions Venetian painters gave an impulse to Spaniards, 

 who in turn have had an extraordinary influence on 

 modern painting. It would be easy, too, although it is 

 not my purpose, to show how much other schools of the 



