scaly sea, the laurel grove, the
flower-embroidered garments, the wisps of tawny hair, is comparatively
mediaeval; 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 mediaeval, 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 mediaeval 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 figu