s, the
realist of the fifteenth century would wander hopelessly were it not for
the antique. Genius and science are of no avail; the position of Christ
in baptism in the paintings of Verrocchio and Ghirlandajo is mean and
servile; the movements of the "Thunder-stricken" in Signorelli's
lunettes is an inconceivable mixture of the brutish, the melodramatic,
and the comic; the magnificently drawn youth at the door of the prison
in Filippino's Liberation of St. Peter is gradually going to sleep and
collapsing in a fashion which is truly ignoble.

And the same applies to sculptured figures or to figures standing
isolated like statues; no Greek would have ventured upon the swaggering
position, with legs apart and elbows out, of Donatello's St. George, or
Perugino's St. Michael; and a young Athenian who should have assumed the
attitude of Verrocchio's David, with tripping legs and hand clapped on
his hip, would have been sent to sit in a corner as a saucy little
ragamuffin.

Coarse nude, stiff drapery, vulgar attitude, was all that the fifteenth
century could offer to its artists; but Antiquity could offer more and
very different things: the naked body developed by the most artistic
training, drapery the most natural and refined, and attitude and gesture
regulated by an education the most careful and artistic; and all these
things Antiquity did give to the artists of the Renaissance. They did
not copy antique statues as living naked men and women, but they
corrected the faults of their living models by the example of the
statues; they did not copy antique stone draperies in coloured pictures,
but they arranged the robes on their models with the antique folds well
in their memory; they did not give the gestures of statues to living
figures, but they made the living figures move in accordance with those
principles of harmony which they had found exemplified in the statues.

They did not imitate the antique, they studied it; they obtained through
the fragments of antique sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity,
and that glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and distortion of the
mediaeval life of the fifteenth century. In the perfection of Italian
painting, the union of antique and modern being consummated, it is
perhaps difficult to disentangle what really is antique from what is
modern; but in the earlier times, when the two elements were still
separate, we can see them opposite each other and compare them in the
wo