que art. They could not perceive the superior
beauty of the antique; they could recognize only its superior science
and its superior handicraft, and these they studied to obtain.

Giovanni Pisano, sculpturing the unfleshed, carved carcases of the
devils who leer, writhe, crunch, and tear on the outside of Orvieto
Cathedral, and the Giottesques painting those terrible green, macerated
Christs, hanging livid and broken from the cross, which abound in
Tuscany and Umbria, the artists who produced these loathsome and
lugubrious works were indubitably students of the antique; but they had
learned from it not a love for beautiful form and noble drapery, but
merely the general shape of the limbs and the general fall of the
garments; the anatomical science and technical processes of antiquity
were being used to produce the most intensely un-antique, the most
intensely mediaeval works. Thus matters stood in the time of Giotto. His
followers, who studied only arrangement, probably consulted the antique
as little as they consulted Nature; but the contemporary sculptors were
brought by the very constitution of their art into close contact both
with Nature and with the antique; they studied both with determination,
and handed over the results of their labours to the sculptor-taught
painters of the fifteenth century.

Here, then, were the two great factors in the art of the
Renaissance--the study of Nature, and the study of the antique; both
understood slowly, imperfectly; the one counteracting the effect of the
other; the study of Nature now scaring away all antique influence; the
study of the antique now distorting all imitation of Nature; rival
forces confusing the artist and marring the work, until, when each could
receive its due, the one corrected the other, and they combined,
producing by this marriage of the living reality with the dead but
immortal beauty, the great art of Michel Angelo, of Raphael, and of
Titian: double like its origin, antique and modern, real and ideal.

The study of the antique is thus placed opposite to the study of Nature,
the comprehension of the works of antiquity is the momentary antagonist
of the comprehension of Nature. And this may seem strange, when we
consider that antique art was itself due to perfect comprehension of
Nature. But the contradiction is easily explained. The study of Nature,
as it was carried on in the Renaissance, comprised the study of effects
which had remained unnoticed by a