ons of the antique, a
something ineffable, which he could not even see clearly when it was
there before him, accustomed as he had been to all the hideousness of
anatomised reality. In these woodcuts he seems hunting it for ever; and
there is one of them which is peculiarly significant, of a nymph in
elaborately wound robes and veils, striding, with an odd, mad, uncertain
swing, through fields of stiff grass and stunted rushes, a baby faun in
her bosom, another tiny goat-legged creature led by the hand, while
she carries uncomfortably, in addition to this load, a silly trophy of
wild-flowers tied to a stick; the personification almost, this lady with
the wide eyes and crazy smile, of the artist's foolishly and charmingly
burdened journey in quest of the unattainable. The imaginative quality,
never intended or felt by the painter himself, here depends on his
embodying longings after the calm and stalwart goddesses on sarcophagus
and vase, in the very thing he most seeks to avoid, a creature borrowed
from a Botticelli allegory, or one of the sibyls of the unspeakable
Perugino himself! The circumstances of this quest, and the accidental
meeting in it of the antique and the mediaeval, the straining, the
Quixote-riding or Three-King pilgrimaging after a phantom, gives to
such work of Domenico's that indefinable quality of _charm_; the man
does not indeed become a poet, but in a measure a subject for poetry.

III

In order to understand what must have passed in the mind of one of those
Florentines of the fifteenth century, we must realise the fact that,
unlike ourselves, they had not been brought up under the influence of
the antique, and, unlike the ancients, they had not lived in intimacy
with Nature. The followers of Giotto had studied little beyond the head
and hands, and as much of the body as could be guessed at under drapery
or understood from movement; and this achievement, with no artistic
traditions save those of the basest Byzantine decay, was far greater
than we easily appreciate. It remained for the men of the fifteenth
century, Donatello, Ghiberti, Masaccio, and their illustrious followers,
to become familiar with the human body. To do so is easy for every one
in our day, when we are born, so to speak, with an unconscious habit
of antique form, diffused not merely by ancient works of art in marble
or plaster, but by more recent schools of art, painting as well as
sculpture, themselves the outcome of classical