ny which they had found exemplified in the statues.

They did not imitate the antique, they studied it; they obtained through
the fragments of antique sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity,
and that glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and distortion of the
mediaeval life of the fifteenth century. In the perfection of Italian
painting, the union of antique and modern being consummated, it is
perhaps difficult to disentangle what really is antique from what is
modern; but in the earlier times, when the two elements were still
separate, we can see them opposite each other and compare them in the
works of the greatest artists. Wherever, in the paintings of the early
Renaissance, there is realism, marked by the costume of the times, there
is ugliness of form and vulgarity of movement; where there is idealism,
marked by imitation of the antique, the nude, and drapery, there is
beauty and dignity. We need only compare Filippino's "Scene before the
Proconsul" with his "Raising of the King's Son" in the Brancacci Chapel;
the grand attitude and draperies of Ghirlandajo's "Zachariah" with the
vulgar dress and movements of the Florentine citizens surrounding him;
Benozzo Gozzoli's noble naked figure of Noah with his ungainly,
hideously dressed figure of Cosimo de' Medici; Mantegna's exquisite
Judith with his preposterous Marquis of Mantua; in short all the purely
realistic with all the purely idealistic art of the fifteenth century.
We may give one last instance. In Signorelli's Orvieto frescoes there is
a figure of a young man, with aquiline features, long crisp hair and
strongly developed throat, which reappears unmistakably in all the
frescoes, and in some of them twice and thrice in various positions. His
naked figure is magnificent, his attitudes splendid, his thrown-back
head superb, whether he be slowly and painfully emerging from the earth,
staggered and gasping with his newly-infused life, or sinking oppressed
on the ground, broken and crushed by the sound of the trumpet of
judgment; or whether he be moving forward with ineffable longing towards
the angel about to award him the crown of the blessed; in all these
positions he is heroically beautiful.

We meet him again, unmistakable, but how different, in the realistic
group of the "Thunderstricken,"--the long, lank youth, with
spindle-shanks and egg-shaped body, bounding forward, with most
grotesque strides, over the uncouth heap of dead bodies, ungainly masse