Others, again, abandoned the old ground of Christian story for the tales of Greece and Rome; and not the least charming products of the time are antique motives treated with the freshness of romantic feeling.
We look in vain for the allegories of the Giottesque masters: that stage of thought has been traversed, and a new cycle of poetic ideas, fanciful, idyllic, corresponding to Boiardo's episodes rather than to Dante's vision, opens for the artist.

Instead of seeking to set forth vast subjects with the equality of mediocrity, like the Gaddi, or to invent architectonic compositions embracing the whole culture of their age, like the Lorenzetti, the painters were now bent upon realising some special quality of beauty, expressing some fantastic motive, or solving some technical problem of peculiar difficulty.

They had, in fact, outgrown the childhood of their art; and while they had not yet attained to mastery, had abandoned the impossible task of making it the medium of universal expression.

In this way the manifold efforts of the workers in the first half of the fifteenth century prepared the ground for the great painters of the Golden Age.

It remained for Raphael and his contemporaries to achieve the final synthesis of art in masterpieces of consummate beauty.
But this they could not have done without the aid of those innumerable intermediate labourers, whose productions occupy in art the place of Bacon's _media axiomata_ in science.