res in a high relief seen from below; despite
his mastery of perspective, they seem hewn out of the background;
despite the rich colours which he displays in his Veronese altar-piece,
they look like painted marbles, with their hard clots of stonelike hair
and beard, with their vacant glance and their wonderful draperies,
clinging and weighty like the wet draperies of ancient sculpture. They
are beautiful petrifactions, or vivified statues; Mantegna's
masterpiece, the sepia "Judith" in Florence, is like an exquisite,
pathetically lovely Eurydice, who has stepped unconscious and lifeless
out of a Praxitelian bas-relief. And there are stranger works than even
the Judith; strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine
Monsters and the Bacchanal among Mantegna's engravings. The group of
three wondrous creatures, at once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and
even more fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard: a Triton,
sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and hair, wheels round his
finned horse, preparing to strike his adversary with a bunch of fish
which he brandishes above him; on him is rushing, careering on an
osseous sea-horse, a strange, lank, sinewy being, fury stretching every
tendon, his long-clawed feet striking into the flanks of his steed, his
sharp, reed-crowned head turned fiercely, with clenched teeth, on his
opponent, and stretching forth a truncheon, ready to run down his enemy
as a ship runs down another; and further off a young Triton, with
clotted hair and heavy eyes, seems ready to sink wounded below the
rippling wavelets, with the massive head and marble agony of the dying
Alexander; enigmatic figures, grand and grotesque, lean, haggard,
vehement, and yet, in the midst of violence and monstrosity,
unaccountably antique. The other print, called the Bacchanal, has no
background: half a dozen male figures stand separate and naked as in a
bas-relief. Some are leaning against a vine-wreathed tub; a satyr, with
acanthus-leaves growing wondrously out of him, half man, half plant, is
emptying a cup; a heavy Silenus is prone upon the ground; a faun, seated
upon the vat, is supporting in his arms a beautiful sinking youth;
another youth, grand, muscular, and grave as a statue, stands on the
further side. Is this really a bacchanal? Yes, for there is the paunchy
Silenus, there are the fauns, there the vat and vine-wreaths and
drinking-horns. And yet it cannot be a bacchanal. Compare with it one of
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