s; dreaded to
leave the cloister where the sunshine was tempered and the noise reduced
to a mere faint hum, and where the flower-beds were tidy and prim;
dreaded to soil or rumple his spotless white robe and his shining black
cowl; a spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd
seething in the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags
off the beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering
at the thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body;
fearful of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense
atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion which might
break through the well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; the
Renaissance did not exist for him who lived in a world of diaphanous
form, colour, and character; unsubstantial and unruffled, dreaming
feebly and sweetly of transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath
their robes; of smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid,
vacant gaze, seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the purity of
inanity; of divine dolls with pallid flaxen locks, floating between
heaven and earth, playing upon lute and viol and psaltery; raised to
faint visions of angels and blessed, moving noiseless, feelingless,
meaningless, across the flowerets of Paradise; of assemblies of saints
seated, arrayed in pure pink, and blue and lilac, in an atmosphere of
liquid gold, in glory. And thus Fra Angelico worked on, content with the
dearly-purchased science of his masters, placid, beatic, effeminate, in
an aesthetical paradise of his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a
paradise for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes; patiently repeating
the same fleshless angels, the same boneless saints, the same bloodless
virgins; happy in smoothing the unmixed, unshaded tints of the sky, and
earth, and dresses; laying on the gold of the fretted skies, and of the
iridescent wings, embroidering robes, instruments of music, haloes,
flowers, with threads of gold.... Sweet, simple artist saint, reducing
art to something akin to the delicate pearl and silk embroidery of pious
nuns, to the exquisite sweetmeat cookery of pious monks; a something too
delicately gorgeous, too deliciously insipid for human wear or human
food; no, the Renaissance does not exist for thee, either in its study
of the truly existing, or in its study of antique beauty.

Mantegna, the learned, the archaeological, the pagan, who renounces his
times a