CHAPTER XVI.
The Accademia Michelangelo--The David--The tomb of Julius--A contrast--Fra Angelico--The beatific painter--Cimabue and Giotto--Masaccio--Gentile da Fabriano--Domenico Ghirlandaio--Fra Angelico again--Fra Bartolommeo--Perugino--Botticelli--The "Primavera"-- Leonardo da Vinci and Verrocchio--Botticelli's sacred pictures--Botticini--Tapestries of Eden.
The Accademia delle Belle Arti is in the Via Ricasoli, that street which seen from the top of the Campanile is the straightest thing in Florence, running like a ruled line from the Duomo to the valley of the Mugnone.

Upstairs are modern painters: but upstairs I have never been.

It is the ground-floor rooms that are so memorable, containing as they do a small but very choice collection of pictures illustrating the growth of Italian art, with particular emphasis on Florentine art; the best assemblage of the work of Fra Angelico that exists; and a large gallery given up to Michelangelo's sculpture: originals and casts.

The principal magnets that draw people here, no doubt, are the Fra Angelicos and Botticelli's "Primavera"; but in five at least of the rooms there is not an uninteresting picture, while the collection is so small that one can study it without fatigue--no little matter after the crowded Uffizi and Pitti.
It is a simple matter to choose in such a book as this the best place in which to tell something of the life-story of, say, Giotto and Brunelleschi and the della Robbias; for at a certain point their genius is found concentrated--Donatello's and the della Robbias' in the Bargello and those others at the Duomo and Campanile.

But with Michelangelo it is different, he is so distributed over the city--his gigantic David here, the Medici tombs at S.Lorenzo, his fortifications at S.Miniato, his tomb at S.Croce, while there remains his house as a natural focus of all his activities.