age to the world in art has been delivered.

Chronology alone would not justify us in drawing these distinctions. What
really separates the two groups is the different degree in which they
severally absorbed the spirit and uttered the message of their age. In the
former the Renaissance was still immature, in the latter it was perfected.
Yet all these painters deserve in a true sense to be called its children.
Their common object is art regarded as an independent function, and
relieved from the bondage of technical impediments. In their work the
liberty of the modern mind finds its first and noblest expression. They
deal with familiar and time-honoured Christian motives reverently; but
they use them at the same time for the exhibition of pure human beauty.
Pagan influences yield them spirit-stirring inspiration; yet the antique
models of style, which proved no less embarrassing to their successors
than Saul's armour was to David, weigh lightly, like a magician's
breast-plate, upon their heroic strength.

Andrea Mantegna was born near Padua in 1431. Vasari says that in his
boyhood he herded cattle, and it is probable that he was the son of a
small Lombard farmer. What led him to the study of the arts we do not
know; but that his talents were precociously developed, is proved by his
registration in 1441 upon the books of the painter's guild at Padua. He is
there described as the adopted son of Squarcione. At the age of seventeen
he signed a picture with his name. Studying the casts and drawings
collected by Squarcione for his Paduan school, the young Mantegna found
congenial exercise for his peculiar gifts.[198] His early frescoes in the
Eremitani at Padua look as though they had been painted from statues or
clay models, carefully selected for the grandeur of their forms, the
nobility of their attitudes, and the complicated beauty of their drapery.
The figures, arranged on different planes, are perfect in their
perspective; the action is indicated by appropriate gestures, and the
colouring, though faint and cold, is scientifically calculated. Yet not a
man or woman in these wondrous compositions seems to live. Well provided
with bone and muscle, they have neither blood nor anything suggestive of
the breath of life within them. It is as though Mantegna had been called
to paint a people turned to stone, arrested suddenly amid their various
occupations, and preserved for centuries from injury in some Egyptian
solitude of dewl