It is a temptation to hasten on from Pollaiuolo and Verrocchio to Botticelli and Leonardo, to men of genius as artists reappearing again after two generations, men who accomplished with scarcely an effort what their precursors had been toiling after. But from these it would be even more difficult than at present to turn back to painters of scarcely any rank among the world's great artists, and of scarcely any importance as links in a chain of evolution, but not to be passed by, partly because of certain qualities they do possess, and partly because their names would be missed in an account, even so brief as this, of Florentine painting. The men I chiefly refer to, one most active toward the middle and the other toward the end of the fifteenth century, are Benozzo Gozzoli and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Although they have been rarely coupled together, they have much in common. Both were, as artists, little more than mediocrities with almost no genuine feeling for what makes painting a great art. The real attractiveness of both lies entirely outside the sphere of pure art, in the realms of _genre_ illustration. And here the likeness between them ends; within their common ground they differed widely. [Page heading: BENOZZO GOZZOLI] Benozzo was gifted with a rare facility not only of execution but of invention, with a spontaneity, a freshness, a liveliness in telling a story that wake the child in us, and the lover of the fairy tale. Later in life, his more precious gifts deserted him, but who wants to resist the fascination of his early works, painted, as they seem, by a Fra Angelico who had forgotten heaven and become enamoured of the earth and the spring-time? In his Riccardi Palace frescoes, he has sunk already to portraying the Florentine apprentice's dream of a holiday in the country on St. John's Day; but what a _naif_ ideal of luxury and splendour it is! With these, the glamour in which he saw the world began to fade away from him, and in his Pisan frescoes we have, it is true, many a quaint bit of _genre_ (superior to Teniers only because of superior associations), but never again the fairy tale. And as the better recedes, it is replaced by the worse, by the bane of all _genre_ painting, non-significant detail, and positive bad taste. Have London or New York or Berlin worse to show us than the jumble of buildings in his ideal of a great city, his picture of Babylon? It may be said he here continues mediaeval tradition, which is quite true, but this very fact indicates his real place, which, in spite of his adopting so many of the fifteenth-century improvements, is not with the artists of the Renaissance, but with the story-tellers and costumed fairy-tale painters of the transition, with Spinello Aretino and Gentile da Fabriano, for instance. And yet, once in a while, he renders a head with such character, or a movement with such ease that we wonder whether he had not in him, after all, the making of a real artist.