and bounding avenging
angels of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of Sodoma, with
exquisite limbs and head, rich with tendril-like locks, delicate against
the brown Umbrian sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated,
with the head and drapery of a Niobe, by the sack of flour in the
Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous goddess, with purple mantle half
concealing her body of golden white, who leans against the sculptured
fountain in Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, with the greenish blue sky
and hazy light of evening behind her; from the most extreme examples of
the most extreme schools of Lombardy and Venetia, to the most intense
examples of the remotest schools of Tuscany and Umbria; throughout the
art of the early sixteenth century, of those thirty years which were the
years of perfection, we see, more or less marked, but always distinct,
the union of the living art born of the Middle Ages with the dead art
left by Antiquity, a union producing life and perfection, producing the
great art of the Renaissance.

This much is clear and easy of definition; but what is neither clearly
understood nor easily defined is the nature of this union, the manner in
which the antique and the modern did thus amalgamate. It is easy to
speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated
the modern; but all this explains but little: art is not a metaphysical
figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to
speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique
with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the
Renaissance of elements of civilization necessary for its perfection,
but not existing in the medieval civilization of the fifteenth century;
of elements of civilization which gave what the civilization of the
fifteenth century--which could give colour, perspective, grouping, and
landscape--could never have afforded: the nude, drapery, and gesture.

The naked human body, which the Greeks had trained, studied, and
idolized, did not exist in the fifteenth century; in its stead there was
only the undressed body, ill-developed, untrained, pinched, and
distorted by the garments only just cast off; cramped and bent by
sedentary occupations, livid with the plague-spots of the Middle Ages,
scarred by the whipmarks of asceticism. This stripped body, unseen and
unfit to be seen, unaccustomed to the air and to the eyes of others,
shivered and cowered for cold