fruit of evil without a glance behind them, without a
desperate setting of their teeth; plucked it openly, calmly, as they
would have plucked the blackberries in the hedge; bit into it, ate it,
with perfect ease and serenity, saying their prayers before and after,
as if it were their natural daily bread mentioned in the Lord's Prayer;
no grimace or unseemly leer the while; no moral indigestion or nightmare
(except very rarely) in consequence. Hence the serenity of their
literature and art. These men and women of the Italian Renaissance have,
in their portraits, a very pleasing nobility of aspect: serene,
thoughtful, healthy, benign. Titian's courtesans are our archetypes of
dignified womanhood; we might fancy Portia or Isabella with such calm,
florid beauty, so wholly unmeretricious and uncankered. The humanists
and priests who lie outstretched on the acanthus-leaved and
flower-garlanded sarcophagi by Desiderio and Rossellino are the very
flowers of refined and gentle men of study; the youths in Botticelli's
"Adoration of The Magi," for instance, are the ideal of Boiardo's
chivalry, Rinaldos and Orlandos every one; the corseleted generals of
the Renaissance, so calm and stern and frank, the Bartolomeo Colleoni of
Verrocchio, the Gattamelata by Giorgione (or Giorgione's pupil), look
fit to take up the banner of the crusade: that Gattamelata in the Uffizi
gallery especially looks like a sort of military Milton: give him a pair
of wings and he becomes at once Signorelli's archangel, clothed in
heavenly steel and unsheathing the flaming sword of God. Compare with
these types Holbein's courtiers of Henry VIII.; what scrofulous hogs!
Compare Sanchez Coello's Philip II. and Don Carlos; what monomaniacs.
Compare even Duerer's magnificent head of Willibald Pirkheimer: how the
swine nature is blended with the thinker. And the swine will be subdued,
the thinker will triumph. Why? Just because there is a contest--because
the thinker-Willibald is conscious of the swine-Willibald. In this
coarse, brutal, deeply stained Germany of the time of Luther, affording
Duerer and Holbein, alas! how many besotten and bestial types, there will
arise a great conflict: the obscene leering Death--Death-in-Life as he
really is--will skulk everywhere, even as in the prints of the day,
hideous and powerful, trying, with hog's snout, to drive Christ Himself
out of limbo; but he is known, seen, dreaded. The armed knight of Duerer
turns away from his grima