ws
how to stand in so unaccustomed a condition of body. The artist must
seek for attitude and gesture among his townsfolk, and among them he can
find only trivial, awkward, often vulgar movement. They have never been
taught how to stand or to move with grace and dignity; the artist must
study attitude and gesture in the marketplace or the bull-baiting
ground, where Ghirlandajo found his jauntily strutting idlers, and
Verrocchio his brutally staggering prize-fighters. Between the
constrained attitudinizing of Byzantine and Giottesque tradition, and
the imitation of the movements of clodhoppers and ragamuffins, the
realist of the fifteenth century would wander hopelessly were it not for
the antique. Genius and science are of no avail; the position of Christ
in baptism in the paintings of Verrocchio and Ghirlandajo is mean and
servile; the movements of the "Thunderstricken" in Signorelli's lunettes
is an inconceivable mixture of the brutish, the melodramatic, and the
comic; the magnificently drawn youth at the door of the prison in
Filippino's "Liberation of St. Peter" is gradually going to sleep and
collapsing in a fashion which is truly ignoble.

And the same applies to sculptured figures or to figures standing
isolated like statues; no Greek would have ventured upon the swaggering
position, with legs apart and elbows out, of Donatello's "St. George,"
or Perugino's "St. Michael;" and a young Athenian who should have
assumed the attitude of Verrocchio's "David," with tripping legs and
hand clapped on his hip, would have been sent away from school as a
saucy little ragamuffin.

Coarse, nude, stiff drapery, vulgar attitude, was all that the fifteenth
century could offer to its artists; but antiquity could offer more and
very different things--the naked body developed by the most artistic
training, drapery the most natural and refined, and attitude and gesture
regulated by an education the most careful and artistic; and all these
things antiquity gave to the artists of the Renaissance. They did not
copy antique statues as living naked men and women, but they corrected
the faults of their living models by the example of the statues; they
did not copy antique stone draperies in coloured pictures, but they
arranged the robes on their models with the antique folds well in their
memory; they did not give the gestures of statues to living figures, but
they made the living figures move in accordance with those principles of
harmo