ts, of straight lines, and broken lines,
and curves. He sees all this; but he sees more: the broken torso is, as
we have said, not merely a world in itself, but the revelation of a
world. It is the revelation of antique civilization, of the palaestra
and the stadium, of the sanctification of the body, of the apotheosis of
man, of the religion of life and nature and joy; revealed to the man of
the Middle Ages, who has hitherto seen in the untrained, diseased,
despised body but a deformed piece of baseness, which his priests tell
him belongs to the worms and to Satan; who has been taught that the monk
living in solitude and celibacy, filthy, sick, worn out with fastings
and bleeding with flagellation, is the nearest approach to divinity; who
has seen Divinity itself, pale, emaciated, joyless, hanging bleeding
from the cross; and who is for ever reminded that the kingdom of this
Godhead is not of this world.

What passes in the mind of that artist? What surprise, what dawning
doubts, what sickening fears, what longings and what remorse are not the
fruit of this sight of Antiquity? Is he to yield or to resist? Is he to
forget the saints and Christ, and give himself over to Satan and to
Antiquity? Only one man boldly answered, Yes. Mantegna abjured his
faith, abjured the Middle Ages, abjured all that belonged to his time;
and in so doing cast away from him the living art and became the lover,
the worshipper of shadows. And only one man turned completely aside from
the antique as from the demon, and that man was a saint, Fra Angelico da
Fiesole. And with the antique, Fra Angelico rejected all the other
artistic influences and aims of his time, the time not of Giotto or of
Orcagna, but of Masaccio and Uccello, of Pollaiolo and Donatello. For the
mild, meek, angelic monk dreaded the life of his days; dreaded to leave
the cloister where the sunshine was tempered and the noise reduced to a
mere faint hum, and where the flower-beds were tidy and prim; dreaded to
soil or rumple his spotless white robe and his shining black cowl; a
spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in
the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off the
beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering at the
thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of
every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his
chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break th