orso.
He sees in that broken stump a grandeur of outline, a magnificence of
osseous structure, a breadth of muscle and sinew, a smooth, firm
covering of flesh, such as he would vainly seek in any of his living
models; he sees a delicate and infinite variety of indentures, of
projections, of creases following the bend of every limb; he sees, where
the surface still exists intact, an elasticity of skin, a buoyancy of
hidden life such as all the colours of his palette are unable to
imitate; and in this piece of drapery, negligently gathered over the
hips or robed upon the arm, he sees a magnificent alternation of large
folds and small creases, of straight lines, and broken lines, and
curves. He sees all this; but he sees more: the broken torso is, as we
have said, not merely a world in itself, but the revelation of a world.

It is the revelation of antique civilization, of the palaestra and the
stadium, of the sanctification of the body, of the apotheosis of man, of
the religion of life and nature and joy; revealed to the man of the
Middle Ages, who has hitherto seen in the untrained, diseased, despised
body but a deformed piece of baseness, which his priests tell him
belongs to the worms and to Satan; who has been taught that the monk
living in solitude and celibacy, filthy, sick, worn out with fastings
and bleeding with flagellation, is the nearest approach to divinity; who
has seen Divinity itself, pale, emaciated, joyless, hanging bleeding
from the cross; and who is for ever reminded that the kingdom of this
Divinity is not of this world.

What passes in the mind of that artist? What surprise, what dawning
doubts, what sickening fears, what longings and what remorse are not
the fruit of this sight of antiquity? Is he to yield or to resist? Is he
to forget the saints and Christ and give himself over to Satan and to
antiquity? Only one man boldly said Yes. Mantegna abjured his faith,
abjured the Middle Ages, abjured all that belonged to his time, and in
so doing cast away from him the living art and became the lover, the
worshipper of shadows. And only one man turned completely aside from the
antique as from the demon, and that man was a saint, Fra Angelico da
Fiesoli. And with the antique, Fra Angelico rejected all the other
artistic influences and aims of his time, the time not of Giotto or of
Orcagna, but of Masaccio, of Uccello, of Poliaiolo and Donatitis. For
the mild, meek, angelic monk dreaded the life of his day