nd his faith; and Angelico, the monk, the saint, who shuts and
bolts his monastery doors and sprinkles holy water in the face of the
antique, the two extremes, are both exceptions. The innumerable artists
of the Renaissance remained in hesitation; tried to court both the
antique and the modern, to unite the pagan and the Christian--some, like
Ghirlandajo, in cold indifference to all but mere form, encrusting
marble bacchanals into the walls of the Virgin's paternal house,
bringing together, unthinkingly, antique-draped women carrying baskets
and noble Stroggi and Ruccellai ladies with gloved hands folded over
their gold brocaded skirts; others, with cheerful and child-like
pleasure in both antique and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together
half-naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and scaling the
trellise with Florentine magnificos in plaited skirts and starched
collars, among the pines and porticos, the sprawling children, barking
dogs, peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking up grain, of
his Scripture histories; yet others using the antique as mere pageant
shows, allegorical mummeries destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or
Marquis of Mantua, together with hurdle races of Jews, hags, and
riderless donkeys.

Little by little the antique amalgamates with the modern; the art born
of the Middle Ages absorbs the art born of paganism; but how slowly, and
with what fantastic and ludicrous results at first; as when the
anatomical sculptor Pollaiolo gives scenes of naked Roman prize-fighters
as martyrdoms of St. Sebastian; or when the pious Perugino (pious at
least with his brush) dresses up his sleek, hectic, beardless archangels
as Roman warriors, and makes them stand, straddling beatically on thin
little dapper legs, wistfully gazing from beneath their wondrously
ornamented helmets on the walls of the Cambio at Perugia; when he
masquerades meditative fathers of the Church as Socrates and haggard
anchorites as Numa Pompilius; most ludicrous of all, when he attires in
scantiest of clinging antique drapery his mild and pensive Madonnas,
and, with daintily-pointed toes, places them to throne bashfully on
allegorical chariots as Venus or Diana.

Long is the period of amalgamation, and little are the results
throughout that long early Renaissance. Mantegna, Piero della Francesca,
Melozzo, Ghirlandajo, Filippino, Botticelli, Verrocchio, have none of
them shown us the perfect fusion of the two elements whose