It is difficult to imagine a style of painting less attractive than that of Paolo Uccello.[164] Yet his fresco of the "Deluge" in the cloisters of S.Maria Novella, and his battlepieces--one of which may be seen in the National Gallery--taught nearly all that painters needed of perspective.

The lesson was conveyed in hard, dry, uncouth diagrams, ill-coloured and deficient in the quality of animation.

At this period the painters, like the sculptors, were trained as goldsmiths, and Paolo had been a craftsman of that guild before he gave his whole mind to the study of linear perspective and the drawing of animals.

The precision required in this trade forced artists to study the modelling of the human form, and promoted that crude naturalism which has been charged against their pictures.

Carefully to observe, minutely to imitate some actual person--the Sandro of your workshop or the Cecco from the marketplace--became the pride of painters.
No longer fascinated by the dreams of mediaeval mysticism, and unable for the moment to invest ideals of the fancy with reality, they meanwhile made the great discovery that the body of a man is a miracle of beauty, each limb a divine wonder, each muscle a joy as great as sight of stars or flowers.