The task before an ambitious young Florentine artist about 1475 was one of assimilation. Pretty much all the knowledge essential for the new painting existed, but in scattered shape. Masaccio had modernized Giotto’s monumental patterns, and had found for himself the new structural values of light and shade. Domenico Veneziano had introduced the handier method of oil painting, and, with Piero della Francesca, had attempted novel refinements in paler tonalities. He and Paolo Uccello had worked out the mysteries of linear perspective. Andrea del Castagno had achieved a systematic and learned anatomy. Antonio Pollaiuolo had added to this an extraordinary knowledge of the human body in violent action. Andrea Verrocchio had demonstrated that these realistic strivings were compatible with grace. It had occurred to no one to combine all these discoveries until Leonardo da Vinci reached his early maturity. The synthesis worked out by him between 1480 and 1498, the dates of his unfinished Adoration of the Kings and Last Supper respectively, is the foundation on which Raphael built. Leonardo da Vinci is the pioneer of the Golden Age. It will help us to realize the greatness of his accomplishment to study first the career of a contemporary and friend, the exquisite artist, Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli, like Leonardo, came under the spell of Verrocchio’s fastidiousness, and went some distance in the direction of the new monumental beauty. Then abruptly he turned aside along solitary lines quite unprecedented, but akin to the mystic past of Siena. His great refusal of progress, his broken and eccentric career, give point to the humanistic centrality and social authority of Leonardo’s painting. The two men represent opposite escapes from the superficial brilliance of the art dominated by Ghirlandaio. Leonardo moved out towards the future, and has lived on as a fine inspiration of academic painting ever since. Botticelli withdrew into himself, and has survived flickeringly in the occasional admiration of kindred spirits. Both express, if in very different fashion, the profound discontent that preluded a new era of art. It will help us to perceive how great Botticelli is in his solitary poetry, to consider two younger contemporaries, Filippino Lippi, his pupil, and Piero di Cosimo, an intelligent imitator of Leonardo, both of whom, sharing Botticelli’s discontent, also sought escape in self-assertiveness of an eccentric sort. As the modern age begins to dawn, the modern temperamental artist appears. The _bottega_ begins to be a studio. Thus Sandro Botticelli[46] has a double importance for us—as an exquisite artist, and even more as the first individualist who strained sorely at the bounds imposed by the collective taste, required a select public, and painted to please himself.