Yet the work done by the artists was the best work of the epoch, far more fruitful of results and far more permanently valuable than that of Filelfo inveighing in filthy satires against his personal foes, or of Beccadelli endeavouring to inoculate modern literature with the virus of pagan vices.

Petrarch in the fourteenth century had preached the evangel of humanism; Giotto in the fourteenth century had given life to painting.
The students of the fifteenth, though their spirit was so much baser and less large than Petrarch's, were following in the path marked out for them and leading forward to Erasmus.

The painters of the fifteenth, though they lacked the unity of aim and freshness of their master, were learning what was needful for the crowning and fulfilment of his labours on a loftier stage.
Foremost among the pioneers of Renaissance-painting, towering above them all by head and shoulders, like Saul among the tribes of Israel, stands Masaccio.[163] The Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine at Florence, painted in fresco almost entirely by his hand, was the school where all succeeding artists studied, and whence Raphael deigned to borrow the composition and the figures of a portion of his Cartoons.

The "Legend of S.Catherine," painted by Masaccio in 8.

Clemente at Rome, though an earlier work, is scarcely less remarkable as evidence that a new age had begun for art.