rocaded skirts; others, with cheerful and childlike
pleasure in both antique and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together
half-naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and scaling the
trellise with Florentine magnificos in plaited skirts and starched
collars, among the pines, and porticos, the sprawling children, barking
dogs, peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking up grain, of
his Pisan frescoes; yet others using the antique as mere pageant shows,
allegorical mummeries, destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or Marquis
of Mantua, together with the hurdle races of Jews, hags, and riderless
donkeys.

Thus little by little the antique amalgamates with the modern; the art
born of the Middle Ages absorbs the art born of Paganism; but how
slowly, and with what fantastic and ludicrous results at first; as when
the anatomical sculptor Pollaiolo gives scenes of naked Roman
prize-fighters as martyrdoms of St. Sebastian; or when the pious
Perugino (pious at least with his brush) dresses up his sleek, hectic,
beardless archangels as Roman warriors, and makes them stand, straddling
beatically on thin little dapper legs, wistfully gazing from beneath
their wondrously ornamented helmets on the walls of the Cambio at
Perugia; when he masquerades meditative fathers of the Church as
Socrates and haggard anchorites as Numa Pompilius; most ludicrous of
all, when he attires in scantiest of--clinging antique drapery his mild
and pensive Madonnas, and, with daintily pointed toes, places them to
throne bashfully on allegorical chariots as Venus or Diana.

Long is the period of amalgamation, and small are the results throughout
that long early Renaissance. Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Melozzo,
Ghirlandajo, Filippino, Botticelli, Verrocchio, have none of them shown
us the perfect fusion of the two elements whose union is to give us
Michael Angelo, Raphael, and all the great perfect artists of the early
sixteenth century; the two elements are for ever ill-combined and
hostile to each other; the modern vulgarizes the antique, the antique
paralyzes the modern. And meanwhile the fifteenth century, the century
of study, of conflict, and of confusion, is rapidly drawing to a close;
eight or ten more years, and it will be gone. Is the new century to find
the antique still dead and the modern still mediaeval?

The antique and the modern had met for the first time and as
irreconcilable enemies in the cloisters of Pisa; and the moder