The rise of this school, so full of importance for Italy, for the world, is very happily illustrated in the Accademia della Belle Arti; and if the galleries of the Uffizi can show a greater number of the best works of the Florentine painters, together with much else that is foreign to them; if the Pitti Palace is richer in masterpieces, and possesses some works of Raphael's Florentine period and the pictures of Fra Bartolomeo and Andrea del Sarto, as well as a great collection of the work of the other Italian schools, it is really in the Accademia we may study best the rise of the Florentine school itself, finding there not only the work of Giotto, his predecessors and disciples, but the pictures of Fra Angelico, of Verrocchio, of Filippo Lippi, of Botticelli, the painters of that fifteenth century which, as Pater has told us, "can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its special and prominent personalities with their profound aesthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type." The art of the Sculptors had been able to free itself from the beautiful but sterile convention of the Byzantine masters earlier than the art of Painting, because it had found certain fragments of antiquity scattered up and down Southern Italy, and in such a place as the Campo Santo of Pisa, to which it might turn for guidance and inspiration. No such forlorn beauty remained in exile to renew the art of painting. All the pictures of antiquity had been destroyed, and though in such work as that of the Cavallini and their school at Assisi there may be found a faint memory of the splendour that had so unfortunately passed away, it is rather the shadow of the statues we find there--in the Abraham of the upper church of S. Francesco, for instance--than the more lyrical and mortal loveliness of the unknown painters of Imperial Rome. Yet it is there, in that lonely and beautiful church full of the soft sweet light of Umbria, that Giotto perhaps learned all that was needed to enable him not only to recreate the art of painting, but to decide its future in Italy. Here in the Accademia in the Sala dei Maestri Toscani you may see an altarpiece that has perhaps come to us from his hands, amid much beautiful languid work that is still in the shadow of the Middle Age, or that, coming after him, has almost failed to understand his message, the words of life which may everywhere be found in his frescoes in Assisi, in Florence, in Padua, spoiled though they be by the intervention of fools, the spoliation of the vandals.