Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/99

1447] imposed their aims and ideals on the new generation of painters, as Niccoló and Giovanni Pisano had done a century before. In the opening years of the fifteenth century the two most flourishing classes of artists in Florence were the sculptors and the goldsmiths or workers in metal. From their shops the men who were to be the pioneers of the new movement went forth, and a race of heroic toilers arose, with no desire but the faithful following of nature and the eager search after truth. Masaccio was the representative of the new movement in painting, the man who took up the banner which had fallen from Giotto's hand, and bore it one stage further in advance. But great as his genius was, and bold as were the innovations which this short-lived master introduced, it would be a mistake to regard his appearance as that of an isolated phenomenon. The way was prepared for him by a succession of lesser artists, who held an intermediate place in this period of transition, between the Giotteschi and the Quattrocento painters. Of these the most important was Gherardo, called Starninia, after his father, Jacopo, surnamed Starna—"the partridge"—a scholar of Antonio Veneziano, who was born in 1354, and admitted to the Painters' Guild in 1387. During the interval, he had been exiled on suspicion of being implicated in the Ciompi riots, and spent nine years in Spain, where he was employed by the reigning monarch, John of Castille, and executed paintings which were still to be seen in the Escurial, early in this century. The young Florentine's naturally wild and turbulent nature became tamed, and his rough manners polished by his residence at the court of Castille; and when, in 1387, he returned to Florence,