understand and enjoy. They end by giving us a sense of antecedent
probability towards literature.

Why should we not try to implant such habits in a child's mind also
for the visual arts?

Unhappily pictures cannot as yet be printed (so to speak) exactly as
they are painted, in the way a writer's manuscript can be, without
losing the quality of the original. The reproduction of a picture is still
a makeshift, and may remain so for a long time, even if accurate and
satisfactory colour reproductions should become available. The size
of a composition has a certain effect on its quality, and colour clings to
what is behind it. Thus a colour will, of course, not be the same on
wood as on slate or marble or copper, and will vary from textile to
textile on which it is applied, as for instance rough or ordinary canvas
or fine linen.

On the whole therefore (despite the childish hanker today for colour
reproductions, no matter how crude) the black and white, made from
a photo that preserves tones and values, give the most satisfactory
image of the original.

With that conviction in mind and with the idea of furnishing
examples on which to educate the eye and the faculties that use the
eye as an instrument, the present edition of Italian Painters of the
Renaissance offers 400 illustrations representing all phases of Italian
pictorial art during the three hundred years that begin a little before
1300 and end short of 1600.

For example: the Byzantine phase is represented by the greatest and
completest master of that style anywhere in the world, namely, Duccio.
The sturdy, severely tactile Romanesque mode by Giotto, its most
creative and most accomplished master, and by his best followers,
Andrea Orcagna and Nardo di Cione.

Then comes the fifteenth century and the struggle started by
Masolino and Masaccio to emancipate painting from degenerate
calligraphic Gothic affectation. Masaccio was a resurrected Giotto,
with even increased power of communicating dignity, responsibility,
spirituality by means of appropriate shapes, attitudes and grouping of
figures. After his early death, Florentine painting, profiting by the
great sculptors Donatello and Ghiberti and developed by artists like
Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Pollaiuolo, Botticelli and Leonardo,
culminated in Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto and their immediate
followers Pontormo and Bronzino. By that time the Florentines not
only had recovered the indispensable mastery of the nude that the

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