The truculence of Andrea’s manner led to a false and scandalous tradition, promulgated by Vasari, that he slew his rival Domenico Veneziano out of jealousy. As a matter of prosaic record, Domenico Veneziano survived his alleged assassin’s death, in 1457, by all of four years. Domenico came down from Venice somewhere about 1438 and brought with him a new technical method. He finished the pictures, which he began in tempera, with veilings or glazes in an oil or varnish medium. He avoided the old frank Gothic coloring in favor of pale tonalities which oddly forecast our modern open-air school. The new method permitted of bolder brushwork and successive over paintings. For the moment it wrought havoc with the old conventional beauty, but it offered the painter new resources and refinements, and eventually made possible the triumphs of Leonardo and Titian. [Illustration: FIG. 98. Domenico Veneziano. Madonna with St. Lucy.—_Uffizi._ ] On the whole, Domenico is merely the shadow of a great name, for we have only a handful of works by him, and those perhaps unrepresentative. The altar-piece of St. Lucy, in the Uffizi, Figure 98, is novel only in its acid and original dissonance of deep rose and pale green. The rugged St. John the Baptist shows an attempt to obtain force of modelling without exaggerating the shadows. This tendency persists in such disciples of Domenico as Baldovinetti and Piero della Francesca, and rules in Florence until Leonardo’s definitive application of Masaccio’s methods. In the profile portraiture of the period Domenico was a master, as shown in an admirable female portrait in Mrs. John L. Gardner’s collection, Figure 99. Many similar heads, which we can hardly ascribe to particular masters, seem to derive from Domenico. One of the most beautiful is in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum at Milan. All of Domenico’s pupils and imitators excel in a minute and topographical style of landscape of which he was probably the inventor. It may be studied in Piero della Francesca, in the Pollaiuoli, in Baldovinetti, and there is even a trace of it in the spacious Alpine background of the Mona Lisa. [Illustration: FIG. 99. Domenico Veneziano. Portrait of a Girl.—_Coll. Mrs. John L. Gardner, Boston._ ] Domenico died in 1461. By that time Florentine realism was emerging from its first phase, and was beginning to investigate with its new resources the facts of motion. It was the moment, too, when certain realists sought to regain the grace which had largely been sacrificed in the struggle for sheer knowledge. [Illustration: FIG. 100. A. Baldovinetti. Madonna.—_Louvre._ ]