rently.

How Mantegna got into the studio of the learned master Squarcione of
Padua is not known. The shepherd lad may have strayed in on a summer's
day, when the door was open, and attracted the painter's attention and
interest. One of the greatest living painters today was a Bavarian
peasant boy, who used to walk ten miles barefoot to the city and back on
Sundays, carrying his shoes to save them, in order to go into the free
galleries and look at the pictures; and somehow, without money, nor
credit, nor introduction, he got into the studio of a good master, and
became a great artist. Mantegna may have done the same. At all events,
he became old Squarcione's favourite pupil.

But when he was inside the studio, he found there a vast collection of
antique fragments of sculpture, which the master had got together from
all sources, and which the pupils were drawing. He was set to drawing
them, too, as the best way of learning how to paint.

That was the logical manifestation and characteristic expression of
Renascence, which was a second birth of Greek and Roman art, science and
literature--one might call it, in Italy, the second birth of civilized
man. It brought with it the desire and craving for something more than
realism, together with the means of raising all art to the higher level
required in order to produce beautiful illusions. Men had found time to
enjoy as well as to fight and pray. In other words, they fought and
prayed less, and the result was that they had more leisure. The women
had begun to care for artistic things much earlier, and they had taught
their children to care for them, and the result was a general tendency
of taste to a higher level. Genius may be an orphan and a foundling, but
taste is the child of taste. Genius is the crude, creative force; but
the gentle sense of appreciation, neither creative nor crude, but
receptive, is most often acquired at home and in childhood. A full-grown
man may learn to be a judge and a critic, but he cannot learn to have
taste after he is once a man. Taste belongs to education rather than to
instruction, and it is the mother that educates, not the schoolmaster.

That faculty of taste was what Italy had acquired between the time of
Cimabue and the time of Mantegna--roughly speaking, between the year
1200 and the year 1450--between the first emancipation of art from the
old Byzantine and Romanesque thraldom and the time when the new art had
so overspread the coun