our, perspective, grouping, and
landscape,--could never have afforded: the nude, drapery, and gesture.

The naked human body, which the Greeks, had trained, studied and
idolized, did not exist in the fifteenth century; in its stead there was
only the undressed body, ill-developed, untrained, pinched, and
distorted by the garments only just cast off, cramped and bent by
sedentary occupations, livid with the plague-spots of the Middle Ages,
scarred by the whip-marks of asceticism. This stripped body, unseen and
unfit to be seen, unaccustomed to the air and to the eyes of others,
shivered and cowered for cold and for shame. The Giottesques ignored its
very existence, conceiving humanity as a bodiless creature, with face
and hands to express emotion, and just enough malformed legs and feet to
be either standing or moving; further, beneath the garments there was
nothing. The realists of the fifteenth century tore off the clothes and
drew the ugly thing beneath, and brought the corpses from the
lazar-houses, and stole them from the gallows, in order to see how bone
fitted into bone, and muscle was stretched over muscle. They learned to
perfection the anatomy of the human frame, but they could not learn its
beauty; they became even reconciled to the ugliness they were accustomed
to see, and, with their minds full of antique examples, Verrocchio,
Donatello, Pollaiolo, and Ghirlandajo, the greatest anatomists of the
fifteenth century, imitated their coarse and ill-made living models when
they imagined that they were imitating antique marbles.

So much for the nude. Drapery, as the ancients understood it in the
delicate plaits of Greek chiton and tunic, in the grand folds of Roman
toga, the fifteenth century could not show; it knew only the stiff,
scanty raiment of the active classes, the shapeless masses of lined
cloth of the merchants and magistrates, the prudish and ostentatious
starched dress of the women, and the coarse, lumpish garb of the monks.

The artist of the fifteenth century knew drapery only as an exotic, an
exotic with whose representation the habit of seeing mediaeval costume
was for ever interfering; on the stripped, unseemly, indecent body he
places, with the stiffness of artificiality, drapery such as he has
never seen upon any living creature; the result is awkwardness and
rigidity. And what attitude, what gesture, can he expect from this
stripped and artificially draped model? None, for the model scarce kno