Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/191

 is an Italian painter, Italian in fatherland and in style. He was born in Florence in 1883, and has been living in Rome since 1910.

Though he has reached the mid-point of his life and his work, I do not know how his credit is rated on the pictorial exchange, nor in what esteem he is held by those doubly ignorant critics who nourish the emaciated arts of the present day with myrrh or hemlock. There are two tribes of these critic-nurses: the old-school tribe of the Minoses, who have nothing left of the original Minos except his monstrosity; and the new-school tribe of the Ten, who retain but one attribute of the original inquisitors—the mask. I fear that Spadini’s name is not in the good books of either tribe. But that may be a good sign after all.

To form a fair judgment of Spadini, one must know the man, and not merely his painting, which in itself might seem so facile and so