tricably 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 Niccolo 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 Manibus 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
mediaeval 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,