figures like hungry
harpies, stalking about in high headgears and stiff gowns, or sitting by
the side of lean and stunted pages, singing (with dolorous voice) to
lutes; or promenading under trees with long-shanked, high-shouldered
gentlemen, with vacant sickly face and long scraggy hairs and beard,
their bony elbows sticking out of their slashed doublets. These courtly
figures culminate in Duerer's magnificent plate of the wild man of the
woods kissing the hideous, leering Jezebel in her brocade and jewels.
These aristocratic women are terrible; prudish, malicious, licentious,
never modest because they are always ugly. Even the poor Madonnas,
seated in front of village hovels or windmills, smile the smile of
starved, sickly sempstresses. It is a stunted, poverty-stricken,
plague-sick society, this mediaeval society of burghers and burghers'
wives; the air seems bad and heavy, and the light wanting physically and
morally, in these old free towns; there is intellectual sickness as well
as bodily in those musty gabled houses; the mediaeval spirit blights what
revival of healthiness may exist in these commonwealths. And feudalism
is outside the gates. There are the brutal, leering men-at-arms, in
slashed, puffed doublets and heavy armour, face and dress as unhuman as
possible, standing grimacing at the blood spurting from John the
Baptist's decapitated trunk, as in Kranach's horrible print, while
gaping spectators fill the castle yard; there are the castles high on
rocks amidst woods, with miserable villages below, where the Prodigal
Son wallows among the swine and the tattered boors tumble about in
drunkenness, or rest wearied on their spades. There are the Middle Ages
in full force. But had these Germans of the days of Luther really no
thought beyond their own times and their own country? Had they really
no knowledge of the antique? Not so; they had heard from their learned
men, from Willibald Pirkheimer and Ulrich von Hutten, that the world had
once been peopled with naked gods and goddesses; nay, the very year
perhaps that Raphael handed to the engraver, Marc Antonio, his
magnificent drawing of the Judgment of Paris, Lukas Kranach bethought
him to represent the story of the good Knight Paris giving the apple to
the Lady Venus. So Kranach took up his steady pencil and sharp chisel,
and in strong, clear, minute lines of black and white showed us the
scene. There, on Mount Ida, with a castellated rock in the distance, the
c