n people like this, the chosen of gods and
men must needs be the fattest.

No, such pagan scenes are mere burlesques, coarse mummeries, such as may
have amused Nuernberg and Augsburg during Shrovetide, when drunken louts
figured as Bacchus and sang drinking songs by Hans Sachs. There is no
reality in all this; there is no belief in pagan gods. If we would see
the haunting divinity of the German Renaissance, we shall find him
prying and prowling in nearly every scene of real life; him, the ever
present, the king of the Middle Ages, whose triumph we have seen on the
cloister wall at Pisa, the Lord Death. His fleshless face peers from
behind a bush at Zatzinger's stunted, fever-stricken lady and imbecile
gentleman; he sits grinning on a tree in Orso Grafs allegory, while the
cynical knights, with haggard, sensual faces, crack dirty jokes with the
fat, brutish woman squatted below; he puts his hand into the basket of
Duerer's tattered pedlar; he leers hideously at the stirrup of Duerer's
armed and stalwart knight. No gods of youth and nature, no Hercules, no
Hermes, no Venus, have invaded his German territories, as they invaded
even his own palace, the burial-ground at Pisa; the antique has not
perverted Duerer and his fellows, as it perverted Masaccio and Signorelli
and Mantegna, from the mediaeval worship of Death.

The Italians had seen the antique and had let themselves be seduced by
it, despite their civilization and their religion. Let us only rejoice
thereat. There are indeed some, and among them the great English critic
who is irrefutable when he is a poet, and irrational when he becomes a
philosopher;--there are some who tell us that in its union with antique
art, the art of the followers of Giotto embraced death, and rotted away
ever after. There are others, more moderate but less logical, who would
teach us that in uniting with the antique, the mediaeval art of the
fifteenth century purified and sanctified the beautiful but evil child
of Paganism; that the goddess of Scopas and the athlete of Polyclete
were raised to a higher sphere when Raphael changed the one into a
Madonna, and Michael Angelo metamorphosed the other into a prophet. But
both schools of criticism are wrong. Every civilization has its inherent
evil; Antiquity had its inherent evils, as the Middle Ages had theirs;
Antiquity may have bequeathed to the Renaissance the bad with the good,
as the Middle Ages had bequeathed to the Renaissance the good w