That is what we are always told, and yet we never quite believe all of it. For, as art is a product of the human mind, it must also be a product of the human will, unless it is altogether unconscious like a dream. But that it is not; for men produce it in their waking hours and with the conscious exercise of their faculties. If a man paints a picture he does so because he wants to paint one. He exercises will and choice in all his actions, and the man who buys a picture does the same. We talk of inspiration in the arts as something that cannot be commanded, but there is also inspiration in the sciences. No man can make a scientific discovery by the pure exercise of his will. It jumps into one mind and not into another just like an artistic inspiration. And further we are taught and trained in the arts as in the sciences; and success in both depends a great deal upon the nature of the training. In both good training will not give genius or inspiration to those who are without it; but it will enable those who possess it to make the most of it; and, what is more, it will enable even the mediocre to produce work of some value. What strikes us most about the Florentine school of painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the fact that its second-rate painters are so good, that we can enjoy their works even when they are merely imitative. But the Florentine school excelled all others of the time in its teaching; most painters of other schools in Italy learnt from Florence; and the inspiration came to them from Florence, they were quickened from Florence, however much their art kept its own natural character. But this school which had the best teaching also produced the most painters of genius. Its level was higher and its heights were higher; and for this reason, that the whole Florentine intellect went both into the teaching and into the practice of painting and sculpture. The Florentine was able to put all his mind, the scientific faculties as well as the aesthetic, into his art. He never relied merely on his temperament or his mood. He was eager for knowledge. It was not enough for him to paint things as he saw them; he tried to discover how they were made, what were the laws of their growth and construction; and his knowledge of these things changed the character of his vision, made him see the human body, for instance, as no mediaeval artist had ever seen it; made him see it as an engineer sees a machine. Just as an engineer sees more in a machine than a man who does not understand its working, so the Florentine saw more in the human body than a mediaeval artist. He saw it with a scientific as well as an aesthetic passion, and all this science of his enriched his art so that there has never since been drawing like the Florentine, drawing at once so logical and so expressive.