Now take =Ghirlandajo’s Visitation= in the Salle des Primitifs as an example of a work which in quite a different way, requires to be understood by light from elsewhere. Note how admirably the figures here are balanced against the sky and the archway in the background. In itself, this is a beautiful and striking picture; but it is also a good illustration of those subjects which cannot adequately be understood by consideration of works in this Gallery alone. The attitudes and costumes of the two principal personages are strictly conventional: nay, if you compare the St. Elizabeth in this Visitation with the same saint in the Mantegna almost opposite, you will see that her dress and features remain fairly typical, even in two such very distinct schools as the Paduan and the Florentine. The relative positions of the Madonna and her elder cousin have come down to Ghirlandajo from a very remote antiquity: they were adopted, with modification, by Giotto, in his fresco of this subject in the Madonna dell’ Arena at Padua. But Giotto also introduced =an arch= in the background, which persists in almost all later representations. His arch, however, is blind—you do not see the sky through it. So is Taddeo Gaddi’s, in his closely similar Visitation at Santa Croce in Florence: but the figures here still more nearly approach the positions of the Ghirlandajo, and they stand more directly framed, as it were, by the arch behind them. Skipping many intermediate examples, each of which leads up to this picture, we come to this beautiful embodiment of Ghirlandajo’s, which, while retaining the simplicity of composition in the earlier examples, shows a fine artistic instinct in the way in which the chief characters are silhouetted in the gap of the archway. Ghirlandajo accepted the older tradition, while transforming it with the skill and taste of the early Renaissance after his own fashion. Those who have visited Florence will remember how Pacchiarotto, in his admirable presentation of the same subject, now in the Belle Arti in that town—which, like this one, is a Visitation with selected saints as spectators—has closely followed Ghirlandajo’s treatment with still further modifications: while the noble embodiment of the same scene by Mariotto Albertinelli, in the Uffizi, consists of the two central figures in the Ghirlandajo or the Pacchiarotto, cut out, as it were, and presented separately with noble effect against a background of sky seen through the archway. In such a case we see distinctly how the individual work can only fairly be judged as a development of motives borrowed from others which have preceded it, and how in turn it gives rise later to still further modifications of its own conception. If you have not yet visited Florence, bear in mind this work when you see the Pacchiorotto and the Albertinelli. It is a good plan for the purposes of such comparison to carry about photographs of other pictures in the same series. You may go straight from the