but has left them to discover truth again for himself, and to transform it in his own fashion.
Involuntarily, and perhaps unconsciously, he has paralleled the whole development of modern painting. He began in the mode of the Tuscans, the Giottesques: he drew with such scrupulous Florentine exactitude, with such diligence in line, as to seem in certain sketches a mere calligrapher. That was the time of his enthusiasm for the precise drawings of Leonardo and the dainty coloring of Filippino Lippi. That was the time—do you remember, Spadini?—when we used to wander among the cypresses of Vincigliata and the caverns of Monte Ceceri, the time when I was publishing the Leonardo. That was the dawn.
But the asceticism of the quattrocentist drawings gave place to Venetian sensuality. Display after simplicity, woman after the Madonna, color after line, Titian after Giotto. He discovered florid flesh, sumptuous stuffs, gleaming silks, golden shadows, summer skies. He undertook broad decorative compositions, country scenes, sacred or profane, in which an oppressive warmth of luxury and of love casts over all a sense of decadent monotony. The “Finding of the Child Moses,” painted many years ago, serves to illustrate this second period.
Then came a Spanish, or, more precisely, a Goyesque period. Sumptuousness yields again
