try that engravings of the most famous pictures
began to be sold in the streets in every important city in Italy. Only a
few years after Mantegna's death, Albert Duerer, the great painter
engraver of Nueremberg, appeared before the council of Venice to try and
get a copyright for his engravings, which were being so cleverly forged
by the famous Raimondi that the copies were sold in the Piazza of Saint
Mark as originals. In passing, it is interesting to remember that Duerer,
whose engravings now sell for hundreds of dollars each, sold them
himself at his own house for prices varying between the values of
fifteen and twenty-five cents, according to the size of the plate. The
Council of Venice refused him the copyright he asked, but interdicted
the copyist from using Duerer's initials.

The immense sale of prints popularized art in Italy at the very time
when the first great printing houses, like the Aldine, were popularizing
learning. Culture, in the same sense in which we use the word, became
preeminently the fashion. Everyone wished to be thought clever, and a
generation grew up which not only read Latin authors with pleasure,
wrote Latin correctly, and had some acquaintance with Greek, but which
took a lively interest in artistic matters, and constituted a real
public for artists, a much larger and a much more critical one than
could be found today among an equal population in any so-called
civilized country. The era of collectors began then, and Mantegna's old
master was the first of them. Every man of taste did his best to get
possession of some fragment of antique sculpture, everyone bought
engravings, everyone went to see the pictures of the great
masters--everyone tried to get together a little library of printed
books. It took two hundred and fifty or three hundred years to develop
the Renascence, but what it produced in Italy alone has not been
surpassed, and in many ways has not been equalled, in the four hundred
years that have followed it.

With its culmination, individualities, even the strongest, became less
distinctly defined, and the romantic side of the art legend was ended.
It is so in all things. The romance of the ocean belongs to those who
first steered the perilous course that none had dared before; many have
been in danger by the sea, many have perished in the desperate trial of
the impossible, but none can be Columbus again; many have done brave
deeds in untracked deserts, but none again can be t