Euphorion - Vol. I / Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance

by Vernon Lee

The artistic development of a nation has its exact parallel in the artistic development of an individual. The child uses his pencil to tell a story, satisfied with balls and sticks as body, head, and legs; provided he and his friends can associate with them the ideas in their minds. The youth sets himself to copy what he sees, to reproduce forms and effects, without any aim beyond the mere pleasure of copying. The mature artist strives to obtain forms and effects of which he approves, he seeks for beauty. In the life of Italian painting the generation of men who flourished at the beginning of the sixteenth century are the mature artists; the men of the fifteenth century are the inexperienced youths; the Giottesques are the children— children Titanic and seraph-like, but children nevertheless; and, like all children, learning more perhaps in their few years than can the youth and the man learn in a lifetime.

Like the child, the Giottesque painter wished to show a situation or express a story, and for this purpose the absolute realization of objects was unnecessary. Giottesque art is not incorrect art, it is generalized art; it is an art of mere outline. The Giottesques could draw with great accuracy the hand: the form of the fingers, the bend of the limb, they could give to perfection its whole gesture and movement, they could produce a correct and spirited outline, but within this correct outline marked off in dark paint there is but a vague, uniform mass of pale colour; the body of the hand is missing, and there remains only its ghost, visible indeed, but unsubstantial, without weight or warmth, eluding the grasp. The difference between this spectre hand of the Giottesques, and the sinewy, muscular hand which can shake and crush of Masaccio and Signorelli; or the soft hand with throbbing pulse and warm pressure of Perugino and Bellini,—this difference is typical of the difference between the art of the fourteenth century and the art of the fifteenth century: the first suggests, the second realizes; the one gives impalpable outlines, the other gives tangible bodies. The Giottesque cares for the figure only inasmuch as it displays an action; he reduces it to a semblance, a phantom, to the mere exponent of an idea; the man of the Renaissance cares for the figure inasmuch as it is a living organism, he gives it substance and weight, he makes it stand out as an animate reality. Thence, despite its early triumphs, the Giottesque style, by its inherent nature, forbade any progress; it reached its limits at once, and the followers of Giotto look almost as if they were his predecessors, for the simple reason that, being unable to advance, they were forced to retrograde. The limited amount of artistic realization required to present to the mind of the spectator a situation or an allegory, had been obtained by Giotto himself, and bequeathed by him to his followers; who, finding it more than sufficient for their purposes, and having no incentive to further acquisition in the love of form and reality for their own sake, worked on with their master's materials, composing and recomposing, but adding nothing of their own. Giotto had observed Nature with passionate interest, because, although its representation was only a means to an end, it was a means which required to be mastered; and as such became in itself a sort of secondary aim; but the followers of Giotto merely utilized his observations of Nature, and in so doing gradually conventionalized and debased these second-hand observations. Giotto's forms are wilfully incomplete, because they aim at mere suggestion, but they are not conventional: they are diagrams, not symbols, and thence it is that Giotto seems nearer to the Renaissance than do his latest followers, not excepting even Orcagna. Painting, which had made the most prodigious strides from Giunta to Cimabue, and from Cimabue to Giotto, had got enclosed within a vicious circle, in which it moved for nearly a century neither backwards nor forwards: painters were satisfied with suggestion; and as long as they were satisfied, no progress was possible. From this Giottesque treadmill, painting was released by the intervention of another art. The painters were hopelessly mediocre; their art was snatched from them by the sculptors. Orcagna himself, perhaps the only Giottesque who gave painting an onward push, had modelled and cast one of the bronze gates of the Florence baptistery; the generation of artists who arose at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and who opened the period of the Renaissance, were sculptors or pupils of sculptors. When we see these vigorous lovers of nature, these heroic searchers after truth, suddenly pushing aside the decrepit Giottesque allegory-mongers, we ask ourselves in astonishment whence they have arisen, and how those broken-down artists of effete art could have begotten such a generation of giants. Whence do they come? Certainly not from the studios of the Giottesques. No, they issue out of the workshops of the stone-mason, of the goldsmith, of the worker in bronze, of the sculptor. Vasari has preserved the tradition that Masolino and Paolo Uccello were apprentices of Ghiberti; he has remarked that their greatest contemporary, Masaccio, "trod in the steps of Brunelleschi and of Donatello." Pollaiolo and Verrocchio we know to have been equally excellent as painters and as workers in bronze. Sculp- ture, at once more naturalistic and more constantly under the influence of the antique, had for the second time laboured for painting. Itself a subordinate art, without much vitality, without deep roots in the civilization, sculpture was destined to remain the unsuccessful pupil of the antique, and the unsuccessful rival of painting; but sculpture had for its mission to prepare the road for painting and to prepare painting for antique influence; and the noblest work of Ghiberti and Donatello was Masaccio, as the most lasting glory- to the Pisani had been Giotto.

With Masaccio began the study of nature for its own sake, the desire of reproducing external objects, without any regard to their significance as symbols, or as parts of a story; the passionate wish to arrive at absolute realization. The merely suggestive outline art of the Giottesques had come to an end; the suggestion became a matter of indifference, the realization became a paramount interest; the story was forgotten in the telling, the religious thought was lost in the search for the artistic form. The Giottesques had used debased conventionalism to represent action with wonderful narrative and logical power; the artists of the early Renaissance became unskilful narrators and foolish allegorists almost in proportion as they became skilful draughtsmen and colourists; the saints had become to Masaccio merely so many lay figures on to which to cast drapery; for Fra Filippo the Madonna was a mere peasant model; for Filippino Lippi and for Ghirlandajo, a miracle meant merely an opportunity of congregating a number of admirable portrait figures in the dress of the day; the Baptism for Verrocchio had significance only as a study of muscular legs and arms; and the sacrifice of Noah had no importance for Uccello save as a grand opportunity for foreshortenings. In the hands of the Giottesques, interested in the subject and indifferent to the representation, painting had remained stationary for eighty years; for eighty years did it develope in the hands of the men of the fifteenth century, indifferent to the subject and passionately interested in the representation. The unity, the appearance of comparative perfection of the art had disappeared with the limits within which the Giottesques had been satisfied to move; instead of the intelligible and solemn conventionalism of the Giottesques, we see only disorder, half-understood ideas and abortive attempts, confusion which reminds us of those enigmatic sheets on which Leonardo or Michael Angelo scrawled out their ideas—drawings within drawings, plans of buildings scratched over Madonna heads, single flowers upside down next to flayed arms, calculations, monsters, sonnets; a very chaos of thoughts and of shapes, in which the plan of the artist is inextricably lost, which mean everything and nothing, but out of whose unintelligible network of lines and curves have issued masterpieces, and which only the foolish or the would-be philosophical would exchange for some intelligible, hopelessly finished and finite illustration out of a Bible or a book of travels. Anatomy, perspective, colour, drapery, effects of light, of water, of shadow, forms of trees and flowers, converging lines of architecture, all this at once absorbed and distracted the attention of the artists of the early Renaissance; and while they studied, copied, and calculated, another thought began to haunt them, another eager desire began to pursue them: by the side of Nature, the manifold, the baffling, the bewildering, there rose up before them another divinity, another sphinx, mysterious in its very simplicity and serenity —the Antique.

The exhumation of the antique had, as we have seen, been contemporaneous with the birth of painting; nay, the study of the remains of antique sculpture had, in contributing to form Niccold Pisano, indirectly helped to form Giotto; the very painter of the Triumph of Death had inserted into his terrible fresco two- winged genii, upholding a scroll, copied without any alteration from some coarse Roman sarcophagus, in which they may have sustained the usual Dis Maniibus Sacrum. There had been, on the part of both sculptors and painters, a constant study of the antique; but during the Giottesque period this study had been limited to technicalities, and had in no way affected the conception of art. The mediæval artists, surrounded by physical deformities, and seeing sanctity in sickness and dirt, little accustomed to observe the human figure, were incapable, both as men and as artists, of at all entering into the spirit of antique art. They could not perceive the superior beauty of the antique; they could recognize only its superior science and its superior handicraft, and these alone they studied to obtain.

Giovanni Pisano sculpturing the unfleshed, caried carcases of the devils who leer, writhe, crunch, and tear on the outside of Orvieto Cathedral; and the Giottesques painting those terrible green, macerated Christs, hanging livid and broken from the cross, which abound in Tuscany and Umbria; the artists who produced these loathsome and lugubrious works were indubitably students of the antique; but they had learned from it not a love for beautiful form and noble drapery, but merely the general shape of the limbs and the general fall of the garments: the anatomical science and technical processes of Antiquity were being used to produce the most intensely un-antique, the most intensely mediæval works. Thus matters stood in the time of Giotto. His followers, who studied only arrangement, probably consulted the antique as little as they consulted nature; but the contemporary sculptors were brought by the very constitution of their art into close contact both with Nature and with the antique; they studied both with determination, and handed over the results of their labours to the sculptor-taught painters of the fifteenth century.

Here, then, were the two great factors in the art of the Renaissance—the study of nature, and the study of the Antique: both understand slowly, imperfectly; the one counteracting the effect of the other; the study of nature now scaring away all antique influence, the study of the antique now distorting all imitation of nature; rival forces confusing the artist and marring the work, until, when each could receive its due, the one corrected the other, and they combined, producing by this marriage of the living reality with the dead but immortal beauty, the great art of Michael Angelo, of Raphael, and of Titian: double, like its origin, antique and modern, real and ideal.

The study of the antique is thus placed opposite to the study of nature, the comprehension of the works of Antiquity is the momentary antagonist of the comprehension of the works of nature. And this may seem strange, when we consider that antique art was itself due to perfect comprehension of nature. But the contradiction is easily explained. The study of nature, as it was carried on in the Renaissance, comprised the study of effects which had remained unnoticed by Antiquity; and the study of the statue, --colourless, without light, shade, or perspective, hampered, and was hampered by, the study of colour, of light and shade, of perspective, and of all that a generation of painters would seek to learn from nature. Nor was this all; the influence of the civilization of the Renaissance, of a civilization directly issued from the Middle Ages, was entirely at variance with the influence of antique civilization through the medium of ancient art; the Middle Ages and Antiquity, Christianity and Paganism, were even more opposed to each other than could be the statue and the easel picture, the fresco and the bas-relief.

First, then, we have the hostility between painting --and sculpture, between the modus operandi of the modern and the modus operandi of the ancient art. Antique art is, in the first place, purely linear art, ¦colourless, tintless, without light and shade; next, it is essentially the art of the isolated figure, without background, grouping, or perspective. As linear art it could directly affect only that branch of painting which was itself linear; and as art of the isolated figure it was ever being contradicted by the constantly developing arts of perspective and landscape. The antique never directly influenced the Venetians, not from reasons of geography and culture, but from the fact that Venetian painting, founded from the earliest times upon a system of colour, could not be affected by antique sculpture, based upon a system of modelled, colourless form; the men who saw form only through the medium of colour could not learn much from purely linear form; hence it is that even after a certain amount of antique imitation had passed into Venetian painting, through the medium of Mantegna, the Venetian painters display comparatively little antique influence. In Bellini, Carpaccio, Cima, and other early masters, the features, forms, and dress are mainly modern and Venetian; and Giorgione, Titian, and even the eclectic Tintoret, were more interested in the bright lights of a steel breastplate than in the shape of a limb; and preferred in their hearts a shot brocade of the sixteenth century to the finest drapery ever modelled by an ancient.

The antique influence was naturally strongest among the Tuscan schools; because the Tuscan schools were essentially schools of drawing, and the draughtsman recognized in antique sculpture the highest perfection of that linear form which was his own domain. Yet while the antique appealed most to the linear schools, even in these it could strongly influence only the purely linear part; it is strong in the drawings and weak in the paintings. As long as the artists had only the pencil or pen, they could reproduce much of the linear perfection of the antique; they were, so to speak, alone with it; but as soon as they brought in colour, perspective, and scenery, the linear perfection was lost in attempts at something new; the antique was put to flight by the modern. Botticelli's crayon study for his Venus is almost antique; his tempera picture of Venus, with the pale blue scaly sea, the laurel grove, the flower-embroidered garments, the wisps of tawny hair, is comparatively mediæval; Pinturicchio's sketch of Pans and satyrs contrasts strangely with his frescoes in the library of Siena; Mantegna himself, supernaturally antique in his engravings, becomes comparatively trivial and modern in his oil-paintings. Do what they might, draw from the antique and calculate its proportions, the artists of the Renaissance found themselves baffled as soon as they attempted to apply the result of then linear studies to coloured pictures; as soon as they tried to make the antique unite with the modern, one of the two elements was sure to succumb. In Botticelli, draughtsman and student though he was, the modern, the mediæval, that part of the art which had arisen in the Middle Ages, invariably had the upper hand; his Venus, despite her forms studied from the antique and her gesture imitated from some earlier discovered copy of the Medicean Venus, has the woe- begone prudery of a Madonna or of an abbess; she shivers physically and morally in her unaccustomed nakedness, and the goddess of Spring, who comes skipping up from beneath the laurel copse, does well to prepare her a mantle, for in the pallid tempera colour, against the dismal background of rippled sea, this mediæval Venus, at once indecent and prudish, is no very pleasing sight. In the Allegory of Spring in the Academy of Florence, we again have the antique; goddesses and nymphs whose clinging garments the gentle Sandro Botticelli has assuredly studied from some old statue of Agrippina or Faustina; but what strange livid tints are there beneath those draperies, what eccentric gestures are those of the nymphs, what a green, ghostlike light illumines this garden of Venus Are these goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as the ancients conceived, or are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines, incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer and mist? In Sandro Botticelli the teachings of the statue are forgotten or distorted when the artist takes up his palette and brushes; in his greater contemporary, Andrea Mantegna, the ever-present antique chills and arrests the vitality of the modern. Mantegna, the pupil of the ancient marbles of Squarcione's workshop even more than the pupil of Donatello, studies for his paintings not from nature, but from sculpture; his figures are seen in strange projection and foreshortening, like figures in a high relief seen from below; despite his mastery of perspective, they seem hewn out of the background; despite the rich colours which he displays in his Veronese altar-piece, they look like painted marbles, with their hard clots of stonelike hair and beard, with their vacant glance and their wonderful draperies, clinging and weighty like the wet draperies of ancient sculpture. They are beautiful petrifactions, or vivified statues; Mantegna's masterpiece, the sepia "Judith" in Florence, is like an exquisite, pathetically lovely Eurydice, who has stepped unconscious and lifeless out of a Praxitelian bas-relief. And there are stranger works than even the Judith; strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine Monsters and the Bacchanal among Mantegna's engravings. The group of three wondrous creatures, at once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and even more fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard: a Triton, sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and hair, wheels round his finned horse, preparing to strike his adversary with a bunch of fish which he brandishes above him; on him is rushing, careering on an osseous sea-horse, a strange, lank, sinewy being, fury stretching every tendon, his long-clawed feet striking into the flanks of his steed, his sharp, reed-crowned head turned fiercely, with clenched teeth, on his opponent, and stretching forth a truncheon, ready to run down his enemy as a ship runs down another; and further off a young Triton, with clotted hair and heavy eyes, seems ready to sink wounded below the rippling wavelets, with the massive head and marble agony of the dying Alexander; enigmatic figures, grand and grotesque, lean, haggard, vehement, and yet, in the midst of violence and monstrosity, unaccountably antique.. The other print, called the Bacchanal, has no background: half a dozen male figures stand separate and naked as in a bas-relief. Some are leaning against a vine-wreathed tub; a satyr, with acanthus-leaves growing wondrously out of him, half man, half plant, is emptying a cup; a heavy Silenus is prone upon the ground; a faun, seated upon the vat, is supporting in his arms a beautiful sinking youth; another youth, grand, muscular, and grave as a statue, stands on the further side. Is this really a bacchanal? Yes, for there is the paunchy Silenus, there are the fauns, there the vat and vine- wreaths and drinking-horns. And yet it cannot be a bacchanal. Compare with it one of Rubens's orgies, where the overgrown, rubicund men and women and fauns tumble about in tumultuous, riotous intoxication: that is a bacchanal; they have been drinking, those magnificent brutes, there is wine firing their blood and weighing down their heads. But here all is different, in this so-called Bacchanal of Mantegna. This heavy Silenus is supine like a mass of marble; these fauns are shy and mute; these youths are grave and sombre; there is no wine in the cups, there are no lees in the vat, there is no life in these magnificent colossal forms; there is no blood in their grandly bent lips, no light in their wide-opened eyes; it is not the drowsiness of intoxication which is weighing down the youth sustained by the faun; it is no grapejuice which gives that strange, vague glance. No; they have drunk, but not of any mortal drink; the grapes are grown in Persephone's garden, the vat contains no fruits that have ripened beneath our sun. These strange, mute, solemn revellers have drunk of Lethe, and they are growing cold with the cold of death and of marble; they are the ghosts of the dead ones of antiquity, revisiting the artist of the Renaissance, who paints them, thinking he is painting life, while that which he paints is in reality death. This anomaly, this unsatisfactory character of the works of both Botticelli and Mantegna, is mainly technical; the antique is frustrated in Botticelli, not so much by the Christian, the mediæval, the modern mode of feeling, as by the new methods and aims of the new art which disconcert the methods and aims of the old art; and that which arrests Mantegna in his development as a painter is not the spirit of Paganism deadening the spirit of Christianity, but the laws of sculpture hampering painting. But this technical contest between two arts, the one not yet fully developed, the other not yet fully understood, is as nothing compared with the contest between the two civilizations, the antique and the modern; between the habits and tendencies of the contemporaries of the artists of the Renaissance and of the artists themselves, and the habits and tendencies of the antique artists and their contemporaries. We are apt to think of the Renaissance as of a period closely resembling antiquity, misled by the inevitable similarity between southern and democratic countries of whatever age; misled still less pardonably by the Ciceronian pedantries and pseudo-antique obscenities of a few humanists, nd by the pseudo-Corinthian arabesques and capitals of a few learned architects. But all this was mere archæological finery borrowed by a civilization in itself entirely unlike that of ancient Greece. The Renaissance, let us remember, was merely the flowering time of that great mediæval movement which had germinated early in the twelfth century; it was merely a more advanced stage of the civilization which had produced Dante and Giotto, of the civilization which was destined to produce Luther and Rabelais. The fifteenth century was merely the continuation of the fourteenth century, as the fourteenth had been of the thirteenth; there had been growth and improvement; development of the more modern, diminishing of the more mediæval elements; but, despite growth and the changes due to growth, the Renaissance was part and parcel of the Middle Ages. The life, thought, aspirations, and habits were mediæval; opposed to the open-air life, the physical training and the materialistic religion of Antiquity. The surroundings of Masaccio and of Signorelli, nay, even of Raphael, were very different from those of Phidias or Praxiteles. Let us think what were the daily and hourly impressions given by the Renaissance to its artists. Large towns, in which thousands of human beings were crowded together, in narrow, gloomy streets, with but a strip of blue visible between the projecting roofs; and in these cities an incessant commercial activity, with no relief save festivals at the churches, brawls at the taverns, and carnival buffooneries. Men and women pale and meagre for want of air, and light, and movement; undeveloped, untrained bodies, warped by constant work at the loom or at the desk, at best with the lumpish freedom of the soldier and the vulgar nimbleness of the prentice. And these men and women dressed in the dress of the Middle Ages, gorgeous perhaps in colour, but heavy, miserable, grotesque, nay, sometimes ludicrous in form; citizens in lumpish robes and long-tailed caps; ladies in stiff and foldless brocade hoops and stomachers; artizans in striped and close-adhering hose and egg-shaped padded jerkin; soldiers in lumbering armour-plates, ill-fitted over ill-fitting leather, a shapeless shell of iron, bulging out and angular, in which the body was buried as successfully as in the robes of the magistrates. Thus we see the men and women of the Renaissance in the works of all its painters: heavy in Ghirlandajo, vulgarly jaunty in Filippino, preposterously starched and prim in Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; while mediæval stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo Gozzoli's Building of Babel. These are the prosperous townsfolk, among whom the Renaissance artist is but too glad to seek for models; but besides these there are lamentable sights, mediæval beyond words, at every street corner: dwarfs and cripples, maimed and diseased beggars of all degrees of loathsomeness, lepers and epileptics, and infinite numbers of monks, brown, grey, and black, in sack-shaped frocks and pointed hoods, with shaven crown and cropped beard, emaciated with penance or bloated with gluttony. And all this the painter sees, daily, hourly; it is his standard of humanity, and as such finds its way into every picture. It is the living; but opposite it arises the dead. Let us turn aside from the crowd of the mediæval city, and look at what the workmen have just laid bare, or what the merchant has just brought from Rome or from Greece. Look at this: it is corroded by oxides, battered by ill-usage, stained with earth: it is not a group, not even a whole statue, it has neither head nor arms remaining; it is a mere broken fragment of antique sculpture,—a naked body with a fold or two of drapery; it is not by Phidias nor by Praxiteles, it may not even be Greek; it may be some cheap copy, made for a garden or a bath, in the days of Hadrian. But to the artist of the fifteenth century it is the revelation of a whole world, a world in itself. We can scarcely realize all this; but let us look and reflect, and even we may feel as must have felt the man of the Renaissance in the presence of that mutilated, stained, battered torso. He sees in that broken stump a grandeur of outline, a magnificence of osseous structure, a breadth of muscle and sinew, a smooth, firm covering of flesh, such as he would vainly seek in any of his living models; he sees a delicate and infinite variety of indentures, of projections, of creases following the bend of every limb; he sees, where the surface still exists intact, an elasticity of skin, a buoyancy of hidden life such as all the colours of his palette are unable to imitate; and in this piece of drapery, negligently gathered over the hips or rolled upon the arm, he sees a magnificent alternation of large folds and small plaits, of straight lines, and broken lines, and curves. He sees all this; but he sees more: the broken torso is, as we have said, not merely a world in itself, but the revelation of a world. It is the revelation of antique civilization, of the palæstra and the stadium, of the sanctification of the body, of the apotheosis of man, of the religion of life and nature and joy; revealed to the man of the Middle Ages, who has hitherto seen in the untrained, diseased, despised body but a deformed piece of baseness, which his priests tell him belongs to the worms and to Satan; who has been taught that the monk living in solitude and celibacy, filthy, sick, worn out with fastings and bleeding with flagellation, is the nearest approach to divinity; who has seen Divinity itself, pale, emaciated, joyless, hanging bleeding from the cross; and who is for ever reminded that the kingdom of this Godhead is not of this world. What passes in the mind of that artist? What surprise, what dawning doubts, what sickening fears, what longings and what remorse are not the fruit of this sight of Antiquity? Is he to yield or to resist? Is he to forget the saints and Christ, and give himself over to Satan and to Antiquity? Only one man boldly answered, Yes. Mantegna abjured his faith, abjured the Middle Ages, abjured all that belonged to his time; and in so doing cast away from him the living art and became the lover, the worshipper of shadows. And only one man turned completely aside from the antique as from the demon, and that man was a saint, Fra Angelico da Fiesole. And with the antique, Fra Angelico rejected all the other artistic influences and aims of his time, the time not of Giotto or of Orcagna, but of Masaccio and Uccello, of Pollaiolo and Donatello. For the mild, meek, angelic monk dreaded the life of his days; dreaded to leave the cloister where the sunshine was tempered and the noise reduced to a mere faint hum, and where the flower-beds were tidy and prim; dreaded to soil or rumple his spotless white robe and his shining black cowl; a spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off the beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering at the thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break through the well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; the Renaissance did not exist for him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour and character, unsubstantial and unruffled; dreaming feebly and sweetly of transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath their robes; of smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid, vacant gaze, seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the purity of inanity; of divine dolls with pallid flaxen locks, floating between heaven and earth, playing upon lute and viol and psaltery; raised to faint visions of angels and blessed, moving noiseless, feelingless, meaningless, across the flowerets of Paradise; of assemblies of saints seated, arrayed in pure pink, and blue and lilac, in an atmosphere of liquid gold, in glory. And thus Fra Angelico worked on, content with the dearly purchased science of his masters, placid, beatic, effeminate, in an æsthetical paradise of his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a paradise for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes; patiently repeating the same fleshless angels, the same boneless saints, the same bloodless virgins; happy in smoothing the unmixed, unshaded tints of the sky, and earth, and dresses; laying on the gold of the fretted skies, and of the iridescent wings, embroidering robes, instruments of music, halos, flowers, with threads of gold.... Sweet, simple artist saint, reducing art to —something akin to the delicate pearl and silk embroidery of pious nuns, to the exquisite sweetmeat cookery of pious monks; a something too delicately gorgeous, too deliciously insipid for human wear or human food; no, the Renaissance does not exist for thee, either in its study of the existing reality, or in its study of antique beauty.

Mantegna, the learned, the archæological, the pagan, who renounces his times and his faith; and Angelico, the monk, the saint, who shuts and bolts his monastery doors and sprinkles holy water in the face of the antique; the two extremes, are both exceptions. The innumerable artists of the Renaissance remained in hesitation; tried to court both the antique and the modern, to unite the Pagan and the Christian—some, like Ghirlandajo, in cold indifference to all but mere artistic science, encrusting marble bacchanals into the walls of the Virgin's paternal house, bringing together, unthinkingly, antique-draped women carrying baskets, and noble Strozzi and Ruccellai ladies with gloved hands folded over their gold brocaded skirts; others, with cheerful and childlike pleasure in both antique and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together half- naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and scaling the trellise with Florentine magnificos in plaited skirts and starched collars, among the pines, and porticos, the sprawling children, barking dogs, peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking up grain, of his Pisan frescoes; yet others using the antique as mere pageant shows, allegorical mummeries, destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or Marquis of Mantua, together with the hurdle races of Jews, hags, and riderless donkeys.