representation. The
unity, the appearance of relative perfection of the art had disappeared
with the limits within which the Giottesques had been satisfied to move;
instead of the intelligible and solemn conventionalism of the
Giottesques, we see only disorder, half-understood ideas and abortive
attempts, confusion which reminds us of those enigmatic sheets on which
Leonardo or Michel Angelo scrawled out their ideas, drawings within
drawings, plans of buildings scratched over Madonna heads, single
flowers upside down next to flayed arms, calculations, monsters,
sonnets, a very chaos of thoughts and of shapes, in which the plan of
the artist is inextricably lost, which mean everything and nothing, but
out of whose unintelligible network of lines and curves have issued
masterpieces, and which only the foolish or the would-be philosophical
would exchange for some intelligible, hopelessly finished and finite
illustration out of a Bible or a book of travels.

Anatomy, perspective, colour, drapery, effects of light, of water, of
shadow, forms of trees and flowers, converging lines of architecture,
all this at once absorbed and distracted the attention of the artists of
the early Renaissance; and while they studied, copied, and calculated,
another thought began to haunt them, another eager desire began to
pursue them: by the side of Nature, the manifold, the baffling, the
bewildering, there rose up before them another divinity, another sphinx,
mysterious in its very simplicity and serenity--the antique.

The exhumation of the antique had, as we have seen, been contemporaneous
with the birth of painting; nay, the study of the remains of antique
sculpture had, in contributing to form Niccoto Pisano, indirectly helped
to form Giotto; the very painter of the "Triumph of Death" had inserted
into his terrible fresco two-winged genii, upholding a scroll, copied
without any alteration from some coarse Roman sarcophagus, in which they
may have sustained the usual _Dis Manibus Sacrum_. There had been, on
the part of both sculptors and painters, a constant study of the
antique; but during the Giottesque period this study had been limited to
technicalities, and had in no way affected the conception of art. The
mediaeval artists, surrounded by physical deformities, and seeing
sanctity in sickness and dirt, little accustomed to observe the human
figure, were incapable, both as men and as artists, of at all entering
into the spirit of anti