rough the
well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; the Renaissance did not exist
for him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour and character,
unsubstantial and unruffled; dreaming feebly and sweetly of
transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath their robes; of
smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid, vacant gaze,
seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the purity of inanity; of
divine dolls with pallid flaxen locks, floating between heaven and
earth, playing upon lute and viol and psaltery; raised to faint visions
of angels and blessed, moving noiseless, feelingless, meaningless,
across the flowerets of Paradise; of assemblies of saints seated,
arrayed in pure pink, and blue and lilac, in an atmosphere of liquid
gold, in glory. And thus Fra Angelico worked on, content with the dearly
purchased science of his masters, placid, beatic, effeminate, in an
aesthetical paradise of his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a
paradise for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes; patiently repeating
the same fleshless angels, the same boneless saints, the same bloodless
virgins; happy in smoothing the unmixed, unshaded tints of the sky, and
earth, and dresses; laying on the gold of the fretted skies, and of the
iridescent wings, embroidering robes, instruments of music, halos,
flowers, with threads of gold.... Sweet, simple artist saint, reducing
art to--something akin to the delicate pearl and silk embroidery of
pious nuns, to the exquisite sweetmeat cookery of pious monks; a
something too delicately gorgeous, too deliciously insipid for human
wear or human food; no, the Renaissance does not exist for thee, either
in its study of the existing reality, or in its study of antique beauty.

Mantegna, the learned, the archaeological, the pagan, who renounces his
times and his faith; and Angelico, the monk, the saint, who shuts and
bolts his monastery doors and sprinkles holy water in the face of the
antique; the two extremes, are both exceptions. The innumerable artists
of the Renaissance remained in hesitation; tried to court both the
antique and the modern, to unite the Pagan and the Christian--some, like
Ghirlandajo, in cold indifference to all but mere artistic science,
encrusting marble bacchanals into the walls of the Virgin's paternal
house, bringing together, unthinkingly, antique-draped women carrying
baskets, and noble Strozzi and Ruccellai ladies with gloved hands folded
over their gold b