By the time of the Grand Dukes the Masonic Guild seems to have decayed. Owing to the new painting, sculpture, and gold-working companies, which had freed themselves from the old organization; and the secularizing of art which followed from these causes, and from the diminished zeal for church-building, the Freemasons must have dwindled away, and the guild died a natural death. Cosimo again revived and united the three sister branches of Art--Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting--in his _Accademia delle Belle Arti_, where they remain to this day. The ensign of the Academy was a group of three wreaths, bay, olive, and oak, with the motto--"_Levan di terra al ciel nostro intelletto_." Lorenzo il Magnifico had paved the way to the revival of sculpture by the school he started in his gardens. The Academy has now a fine building for itself, and a very interesting collection of paintings, chiefly of the early schools. Here we will leave the painters, who no longer have any connection with the great Masonic Guild. That fraternity, nevertheless, forms the link of connection between the old classic art and the Renaissance in painting, as in all the other branches. Without it we should have had no grand frescoes by Giotto, the Lorenzetti, the Memmi, and the Gaddi, for the lodges at Siena and Florence trained their art; and it is a certain fact that after the secession of the painters, the glorious days of fresco-painting were over. The painters no longer worked together to beautify every inch of the churches built by the brotherhood, but they painted for themselves, for personal fame and money. Madonnas, votive pictures, and portraits multiplied: the commission and the patron ruled the art. Imagination and inspiration rarely dominated, except in rare cases like Fra Angelico, Fra Bartolommeo, Raphael, and Michael Angelo, and other of the greatest Masters who stand forth from the crowd of artists, endowed with true genius. FOOTNOTES: [199] Mulroody's _S. Clemente_. St. Asterius, Bishop of Amasia (fourth century), describes a fresco of the martyr St. Euphemia of Chalcedonia, which moved him to tears, and St. Paulinus of Nola (died 401) describes a Basilica covered with paintings.