rouped and superb agonies taught by the antique;
just as the two archangels of the "Hell," in their armour of Baglioni's
heavy cavalry, may represent the modern element, and the same
archangels, naked, with magnificent flying draperies, blowing the
trumpets of the Resurrection, may show the antique element in
Renaissance art.

The antique influence was not, indeed, equally strong throughout Italy;
it was strongest in the Tuscan school, which, seeking for perfection of
linear form, found that perfection in the antique; it was weakest in the
Lombard and Venetian schools, which sought for what the antique could
not give, light and shade and colour; the antique was most efficacious
where it was most indispensable, and it was more necessary to a Tuscan,
strong only with his charcoal or pencil, than to Leonardo da Vinci, who
could make an imperfect figure, beckoning mysteriously from out of the
gloom, more fascinating than the finest drawn Florentine Madonna, and
could surround an insignificant childish head with the wondrous sheen
and ripple of hair, as with an aureole of poetry; it was also less
necessary to Giorgione and Titian, who could hide coarse limbs beneath
their draperies of precious ruby, and transfigure, by the liquid gold of
their palettes, a peasant woman into a goddess. But even the Lombards,
even the Venetians, required the antique influence. They could not
perhaps have obtained it direct like the Tuscans: the colourists and
masters of light and shade might never have understood the blank lines
and faint shadows of the marble; but they received the antique
influence, strong but modified by the medium through which it had
passed, from Mantegna; and the relentless self-sacrifice to Antiquity,
the self-paralyzation of the great artist, was not without its use: from
Venetian Padua, Mantegna influenced the Bellini and Giorgione; from
Lombard Mantua, he influenced Leonardo; and Mantegna's influence was
that of the antique.

What would have been the art of the Renaissance without the antique? The
speculation is vain, for the antique had influenced it, had been goading
it on ever since the earliest times; it had been present at its birth,
it had affected Giotto through Niccolo Pisano, and Masaccio through
Ghiberti; the antique influence cannot be conceived as absent in the
history of Italian painting. So far, as a study of the impossible, the
speculation respecting the fate of Renaissance art had it not been
influe