imitation. The early
Italian Renaissance had little or none of these facilitations. Fragments
of Greek and Roman sculpture were still comparatively uncommon before
the great excavations of the sixteenth century; nor was it possible for
men so unfamiliar, not merely with the antique, but with Nature itself,
to profit very rapidly by the knowledge and taste stored up even in
those fragments. It was necessary to learn from reality to appreciate
the antique, however much the knowledge of the antique might later
supplement, and almost supplant, the study of reality. So these men of
the fifteenth century had to teach themselves, in the first instance,
the very elements of this knowledge. And here their position, while
yet so unlike ours, was even more utterly unlike that of the ancients
themselves. The great art of Greece undoubtedly had its days of
ignorance; but for those ancient painters and sculptors, who for
generations had watched naked lads exercising in the school or
racecourse, and draped, half-naked men and women walking in the
streets and working in the fields, their ignorance was of the means
of representation, not of the object represented. It is the hand, the
tool which is at fault in those constrained, simpering warriors of the
schools of AEgina, in those slim-waisted daemonic dancers of the Apulian
vases; the eye is as familiar with the human body, the mind as accustomed
to select its beauty from its ugliness, as the eye and mind of such of us
as cannot paint are familiar nowadays with the shapes and colours, with
the charm of the trees and meadows that we love. The contemporaries, on
the contrary, of Donatello had received from the sculptors of the very
farthest Middle Ages, those who carved the magnificent patterns of
Byzantine coffins and the exquisite leafage of Longobard churches, a
remarkable mastery over the technical part of their craft. The hand
was cunning, but the eye unfamiliar. Hence it comes that the sculpture
of the earlier Renaissance displays perfection of workmanship, which
occasionally blinds us to its poverty of form, and even to its
deficiency of science. And hence also the rapidity with which every
additional item of knowledge is put into practice that seems to argue
perfect familiarity. But these men were not really familiar with their
work. The dullest modern student, brought up among casts and manuals,
would not be guilty of the actual anatomical mistakes committed every
now and then by