It is in every way to be hoped in Benozzo’s case that he was at once too cheerful and too unintelligent to grasp the situation. This may be fairly supposed of a man who was content for fifty years of a swiftly moving world with what could be learned from Fra Angelico. [Illustration: FIG. 107. Benozzo Gozzoli. Detail from Procession of Magi.—_Riccardi Palace._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 108. Antonio Pollaiuolo. Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.—_London._ ] Of course some painters declined to keep holiday and feverishly pursued the lines of realistic investigation laid down by Castagno and his contemporaries. The most notable of these is Antonio Pollaiuolo.[41] He was trained in sculpture under Ghiberti, and worked most variously, at sculpture, painting, engraving, glass designing, and even embroiderers’ patterns. Everywhere he pursued with an almost ferocious intensity the secrets of anatomy and especially of the human body in violent action. He conceived the body as a powerful machine and rejoiced to display its mechanisms—knotted muscles, straining sinews. He chose his subjects with this sort of display in mind: Hercules and his feats, the archers setting their bows and crossbows for the slaying of St. Sebastian, nude men in deadly combat with dirks and axes, nude men wildly dancing. Nearly all these works suffer from their avowed experimentalism, but all are alive with a tingling not to say brutal energy. Antonio Pollaiuolo is the ancestor of all the strong painters who for over four centuries have delighted to appal the mild and sheeplike throng with wolfish antics. He is the first artist who is a specialist, pursuing his own ends in disregard of the surrounding public. As a matter of fact, Antonio’s muscular paganism fitted in fairly well with the notions of a Florence that worshipped power. The Medici ordered the twelve feats of Hercules for their palace, about the year 1460. The great pictures are lost, but little copies by Antonio himself give an idea of their truculent force. In the Uffizi are Hercules crushing the breath out of the earthborn demigod Antæus, and Hercules slaying the Hydra. The tension, ardor, and ferocity of these tiny pictures are extraordinary. They seem to enhance our own physical life. At New Haven is the panel of Hercules shooting the Centaur Nessus, who races across a ford with Deinaira on his back. The background is an exact picture of the Arno valley looking from the west towards Florence. The representation of the run of the river is extraordinary. Pollaiuolo had adopted Domenico Veneziano’s miniature conception of landscape, but has introduced swing and motion.