s
with soles and nostrils uppermost, lying in beast-like confusion. This
youth, with something of a harlequin in his jumps and in his ridiculous
thin legs and preposterous round body, is evidently the model for the
naked demi-gods of the "Resurrection" and the "Paradise:" he is the
handsome boy as the fifteenth century gave him to Signorelli; opposite,
he is the living youth of the fifteenth century idealized by the study
of ancient sculpture; just as the "Thunderstricken" may be some scene of
street massacre such as Signorelli may have witnessed at Cortona or
Perugia, while the agonies of the "Hell" are the grouped and superb
agonies taught by the antique; just as the two archangels of the "Hell,"
in their armour of Baglioni's heavy cavalry, may represent the modern
element, and the same archangels, naked, with magnificent flying
draperies, blowing the trumpets of the Resurrection, may show the
antique element in Renaissance art. The antique influence was not,
indeed, equally strong throughout Italy; it was strongest in the Tuscan
school which, seeking for perfection of linear form, found that
perfection in the antique; it was weakest in the Lombard and Venetian
schools, which sought for what the antique could not give, light and
shade and colour; the antique was most efficacious where it was most
indispensable, and it was more necessary to a Tuscan, strong only with
his charcoal or pencil than to Leonardo da Vinci, who could make an
imperfect figure, smiling mysteriously from out of the gloom, more
fascinating than the finest drawn Florentine Madonna, and could surround
an insignificant childish head with the wondrous sheen and ripple of
hair, as with an aureole of poetry; it was also less necessary to
Giorgione and Titian, who could hide coarse limbs beneath their
draperies of precious ruby, and transfigure, by the liquid gold of their
palettes, a peasant woman into a goddess.

But even the Lombards, even the Venetians, required the antique
influence. They could not perhaps have obtained it direct like the
Tuscans; the colourists and masters of light and shade might never have
understood the blank lines and faint shadows of the marble: they
received the antique influence, strong but modified by the medium
through which it had passed, from Mantegna; and the relentless
self-sacrifice to antiquity, the self-paralyzation of the great artist,
was not without its use; from Venetian Padua, Mantegna influenced the
Bellini a