Nowhere does the superiority of Florence show more clearly than in the attitude of her artists to Leonardo. Where his Milanese followers aped his superficial mannerisms, his Florentine admirers studied and assimilated his construction in light and shade and his principles of geometrical composition. Unhappily the early years of the sixteenth century were a slack time in Florence. Such transitional painters as Piero di Cosimo, Granacci, Franciabigio, Il Bacchiacca, and Ridolfo Ghirlandaio were not men to carry forward Leonardo’s discoveries, but they and others, at least paid him an intelligent homage and sensibly clarified their practice under his influence. Greater intelligences like Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto not merely adopted Leonardo’s canons, but even at certain points criticized them. Both saw the drawback of Leonardo’s passionate concern with chiaroscuro—that it flooded the canvas with colorless shadow, tending to reduce the palette to black and white. Both men then therefore kept their rich shadows colorful. Both worked for a more compact and intricate composition as well as for graceful, abstract poses. In these latter endeavors they simplified and sharpened principles which Leonardo himself only rarely carried to their logical extreme. Leonardo retained certain primitive qualities. He seldom reduced his compositions to dense arrangements of the figures, loving to allow elbow room and delighting to open up landscape backgrounds. And while in the “Treatise on Painting” he advocated elaborately balanced and counterpoised poses, in practice he usually sought an excuse for them in action. A consummate stylist, he achieved style on a basis of function. The pose, in his own words, must express “the emotions of the soul.” Right here his ablest followers took issue with him. Posture with them no longer expressed specific or individual emotion, but abstract beauties of grace, dignity or grandeur. The figures no longer do or feel anything, they are arranged as the general composition and mood of the picture require. Such gradual advance towards pure style heralds the advent of the High Renaissance. [Illustration: FIG. 159. Fra Bartolommeo. God appearing to two Saints.—_Lucca._ ]