d women
dressed in the dress of the Middle Ages, gorgeous perhaps in colour, but
heavy, miserable, grotesque, nay, sometimes ludicrous in form; citizens
in lumpish robes and long-tailed caps; ladies in stiff and foldless
brocade hoops and stomachers; artisans in striped and close-adhering
hose and egg-shaped padded jerkin; soldiers in lumbering armour-plates,
ill-fitted over ill-fitting leather, a shapeless shell of iron, bulging
out and angular, in which the body was buried as successfully as in the
robes of the magistrates. Thus we see the men and women of the
Renaissance in the works of all its painters; heavy in Ghirlandajo,
vulgarly jaunty in Fillipino, preposterously starched and prim in
Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; and mediaeval stiffness,
awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the little boys,
companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo Gozzoli's
Building of Babel.

These are the prosperous townsfolk, among whom the Renaissance artist
is but too glad to seek for models; but besides these there are
lamentable sights, mediaeval beyond words, at every street corner--dwarfs
and cripples, maimed and diseased beggars of all degrees of
loathsomeness, lepers and epileptics, and infinite numbers of monks,
brown, grey and black, in sack-shaped frocks and pointed hoods, with
shaven crown and cropped beard, emaciated with penance or bloated with
gluttony. And all this the painter sees, daily, hourly; it is his
standard of humanity, and as such finds its way into every picture. It
is the living; but opposite it arises the dead. Let us turn aside from
the crowd of the mediaeval city, and look at what the workmen have just
laid bare, or what the merchant has just brought from Rome or from
Greece. Look at this: it is corroded by oxides, battered by ill-usage,
stained with earth: it is not a group, not even a whole statue, it has
neither head nor arms remaining; it is a mere broken fragment of antique
sculpture,--a naked body with a fold or two of drapery; it is not by
Phidias nor by Praxiteles, it may not even be Greek; it may be some
cheap copy, made for a garden or a bath, in the days of Hadrian. But to
the artist of the fifteenth century it is the revelation of a whole
world, a world in itself. We can scarcely realize all this; but let us
look and reflect, and even we may feel as must have felt the man of the
Renaissance in the presence of that mutilated, stained, battered t