nd Giorgione; from Lombard Mantua, he influenced Leonardo; and
Mantegna's influence was that of the antique.

What would have been the art of the Renaissance without the antique? The
speculation is vain, for the antique had influenced it, had been goading
it on ever since the earliest times; it had been present at its birth,
it had affected Giotto through Niccoto Pisano, and Masaccio through
Ghiberti; the antique influence cannot be conceived as absent in the
history of Italian painting. So far, as a study of the impossible, the
speculation respecting the fate of Renaissance art had it not been
influenced by the antique would be childishly useless. But lest we
forget that this antique influence did exist, lest, grown ungrateful and
blind, we refuse it its immense share in producing Michel Angelo,
Raphael, and Titian, we may do well to turn to an art born and bred like
Italian art, in the Middle Ages; like it, full of strength and power of
self-development, but which, unlike Italian art, was not influenced by
the antique. This art is the great German art of the early sixteenth
century; the art of Martin Schongauer, of Aldegrever, of Graf, of
Wohlgemuth, of Pencz, of Zatzinger, of Kranach, and of the great
Albrecht Duerer, whom they resemble as Pinturricchio, and Lo Spagna
resemble Perugino, as Palma and Pario Bordone resemble Titian. This is
an art born in a civilization less perfect indeed than that of Italy,
narrower, as Nuernberg is narrower than Florence, but resembling it in
habits, dress, religion, above all the main characteristic of being
mediaeval; and its masters, as great as their Italian contemporaries in
all the technicalities of the art, and in absolute honesty of endeavour,
may show what the Italian art of the sixteenth century might have been
without the antique. Let us therefore open a portfolio of those
wonderful minute yet grand engravings of the old Germans. They are for
the most part Scriptural scenes or allegories, quite analogous to those
of the Italians, but purely realistic, conscious of no world beyond that
of an Imperial City of the year 1500. Here we have the whole turn-out,
male and female, of a German free town, in the shape of scenes from the
lives of the Virgin and saints; here are short fat burghers, with
enormous blotchy, bloated faces and little eyes set in fat, their huge
stomachs protruding from under their jackets; here are blear-eyed
ladies, tall, thin, wrinkled though not old, with