If you leave these pictures, in the National Gallery, and walk over to Orcagna's "Coronation of the Virgin," you will see where the ornamental charm of the early Renaissance realists probably found its origin. For these convalescent men made no sudden and unanticipated appearance. They were preceded by painters like Orcagna, who were beginning to feel the impossibility of making a beautiful image out of the Christian type, and who therefore crammed their pictures with ornament in a manner so prodigal that the human portion of them assumed quite a subordinate place. Look at this picture of Orcagna's. It seems positively to ring with gold. Massed halos of the precious metal convert the faces of the people into mere decorative discs of colour. The golden embroidery on the dresses and on the hangings in the background give you a feeling of sunshine, of wealth and of luxury, which makes you forget the ideal for which all this lavish display is acting but as a subtle impresario. And the utilization of every square inch of room by filigrees, festoons, frills and fretwork of gorgeousness, almost convinces you at last that you are in front of an art which says "Yea" to the glory of sunshine, beauty and life. In this very need of extravagant ornament, however, Orcagna confesses quite openly to you that, as far as humanity is concerned, he, as an artist, is bankrupt and destitute. His picture, like most things connected with the art of Christianity, is a pictorial paradox; and when you leave it, to wander through the other rooms, your mind must be of a singularly ingenuous stamp if it feels no suspicion with regard to Orcagna's use of such a deafening brass band in the exaltation of his ideal. If you doubt all this, how can you explain the fact that those painters of the early Renaissance who remained faithful to the Christian type--such men, I mean, as Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Alesso Baldovinetti, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio--all remained more or less faithful, too, to Orcagna's belief in ornament and pretty accessories; while all those painters who either carried on or developed the new spirit in Pisanello's, Ucello's, Masolino's and Masaccio's work-- such men as Pollajuolo, Verrochio, Perugini, Bellini, and ultimately Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael--all discarded pretty and seductive accessories, or, when they did use them, made them completely subordinate to the human element in their work? The gradual growth in the importance of the human body and of the Pagan type, in the Renaissance painters, from Masaccio to Michelangelo, with whom there can no longer be any question of convalescence, the rapid return to a healthy life-affirming type, and the ultimate triumph of this type in the very heart of the Vatican--the headquarters of the greatest negative religion on earth,--these are the facts which make the art of this age so admirable and so thrilling.