d column and scalloped
niche, and then rows of dainty warriors and virtues; how full of meaning
to the eye and spirit is not this art so meaningless to the literary
mind!

Of course the painting of that age never became an art of mere pattern
like the architecture. The whole life and thought of the time was poured
into it; and the art itself developed in its upward movement a number
of scientific interests--perspective, anatomy, expression--which
counteracted that tendency to seek for mere beauty of arrangement and
detail. Yet the perfection of Renaissance art never lies in any realism
in our modern sense, still less in such suggestiveness as belongs to our
literary age; and its triumph is when Raphael can vary and co-ordinate
the greatest number of heads, of hands, feet, and groups, as in the
School of Athens, the Parnassus, the marvellous little Bible histories
of the Loggie; above all, in that "Vision of Ezekiel," which is the very
triumph of compact and harmonious composition; when Michelangelo can
tie human beings into the finest knots, twist them into the most shapely
brackets, frameworks, and key-stones. Even throughout the period of
utmost realism, while art was struggling with absorbing problems, men
never dreamed of such realism as ours. They never painted a corner of
nature at random, merely for the sake of veracity; they never modelled
a modern man or woman in their real everyday dress and at their real
everyday business. In the midst of everything composition ruled supreme,
and each object must needs find its echo, be worked into a scheme of
lines, or, with the Venetians, of symmetrically arranged colours. There
is an anatomical engraving by Antonio Pollaiolo, one of the strongest
realists of his time, which sums up the tendencies of fifteenth-century
art. It is a combat of twelve naked men, extraordinarily hideous and
in hideous attitudes, but they are so arranged that their ungainly and
flayed-looking limbs form with the background of gigantic ivy tendrils
an intricate and beautiful pattern, such as we find in Morris's paper
and stuffs.

This hankering after pattern, this desire for beauty as such, became
manifest in Domenico Neroni after his first sojourn in Rome.

The Roman basilicas, with their stately rows of columns, Corinthian and
Ionic, taken from some former temple, and their sunken floor, solemn
with Byzantine patterns of porphyry and serpentine, had impressed with
their simplicity and harmony