272 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. Chap. X. justified in glancing at the principal works which they left behind them, and in explaining the tendencies and peculiarities which they reveal. Brunelleschi appears to us, even at this distance of time, as an extraordinarily gifted man. Born in the fourteenth century, 1 his father would have had him bred to the law or to medicine. But his genius lay in a different direction, and he entered the atelier of a goldsmith, where he studied all the branches of the arts and sciences usually taught there. Through the same course which brought Verrocchio and Leonardo to fame as painters, sculptors, and engineers, Brunelleschi became the greatest engineering architect of his time; and, circumstances leading him to a special pursuit of one brauch amongst the many which he had mastered, he gradually abandoned design and sculpture, the study of perspective and statuary, for the more lucrative one in which he distanced his numerous com petitors. No reader of Vasari’s delightful biographies will have forgotten Brunelleschi’s candid remark upon a Christ crucified which Donatello showed him. „You have crucified a rustic”, he cried; 2 and to prove more fully what those words were intended to convey, Brunelleschi proceeded to carve in wood a similar figure which ex torted from Donatello the admission that he was beaten at his own weapons. This work is still in S. Maria Novella at Florence. It shows us that, though Brunelleschi was not imbued with the Christian ideal of type, though he failed in selection, which was the quality of Giotto and Angelico, he was still fully alive to the necessity of ennobling the features and form of the Saviour, and possessed a fibre of gentleness which might be sought in vain in Donatello. At the same time, he displayed a natural progress in rendering the play of flesh and muscles. His was clearly a higher nature than that of his friend, one not as yet redolent of the materialistic- spirit in which the new century opened, one still enjoying ' Born 1377. Died 1466. Vas. III. p.p. 198 and 246.