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