nced by the antique would be childishly useless. But lest we
forget that this antique influence did exist, lest, grown ungrateful and
blind, we refuse it its immense share in producing Michael Angelo,
Raphael, and Titian, we may do well to turn to an art born and bred like
Italian art, in the Middle Ages; like it, full of strength and power of
self-development, but which, unlike Italian art, was not influenced by
the antique. This art is the great German art of the early sixteenth
century; the art of Martin Schongauer, of Aldegrever, of Altdorfer, of
Wohlgemuth, of Kranach, of Albrecht Duerer and Hans Holbein, whom they
resemble as Pinturicchio and Lo Spagna resemble Perugino, as Palma and
Paris Bordone resemble Titian. This is an art born in a civilization
less perfect indeed than that of Italy, narrower, as Nuernberg or Basle
is narrower than Florence; but resembling it in habits, dress, religion,
above all, the main characteristic of being mediaeval; and its masters,
as great as their Italian contemporaries in all the technicalities of
the art, and In absolute honesty of endeavour, may show what the Italian
art of the sixteenth century might have been without the antique. Let us
therefore open a portfolio of those wonderful minute yet grand
engravings of the old Germans. They are for the most part Scriptural
scenes or allegories, quite analogous to those of the Italians, but
purely realistic, conscious of no world beyond that of an Imperial City
of the year 1520. Here we have the whole turn-out, male and female, of a
German free-town, in the shape of scenes from the lives of the Virgin
and saints; here are short fat burghers, with enormous blotchy, bloated
faces and little eyes set in fat, their huge stomachs protruding from
under their jackets; here are blear-eyed ladies, tall, thin, wrinkled
though not old, with figures like hungry harpies, stalking about in high
headgears and stiff gowns, or sitting by the side of lean and stunted
pages, singing (with dolorous voice) to lutes; or promenading under
trees with long-shanked, high-shouldered gentlemen, with vacant sickly
face and long scraggy hair and beard, their bony elbows sticking out of
their slashed doublets. These courtly figures culminate in Duerer's
magnificent plate of the wild man of the woods kissing the hideous,
leering Jezebel in her brocade and jewels. These aristocratic women are
terrible; prudish, malicious, licentious, never modest because they are
alw