intrusion of paganism into modern art.
The classical revival had worked but partially and indirectly upon
Ghiberti and Donatello--not because they did not feel it most intensely,
but because they clung to nature far more closely than to antique
precedent. This enthusiasm inspired Sansovino with the best and strongest
qualities that he can boast; and if his genius had been powerful enough to
resist the fascination of merely rhetorical effects, he might have
produced a perfect restoration of the classic style. His was no lifeless
or pedantic imitation of antique fragments, but a real expression of the
fervour with which the modern world hailed the discoveries revealed to it
by scholarship. This is said advisedly. The most beautiful and spirited
pagan statue of the Renaissance period, justifying the estimate here made
of Sansovino's genius, is the "Bacchus" exhibited in the Bargello Museum.
Both the Bacchus and the Satyriscus at his side are triumphs of realism,
irradiated and idealised by the sculptor's vivid sense of natural
gladness. Considered as a restitution of the antique manner, this statue
is decidedly superior to the "Bacchus" of Michael Angelo. While the
mundane splendour of Venice gave body and fulness to Sansovino's paganism,
he missed the self-restraint and purity of taste peculiar to the studious
shades of Florence. In his style, both architectural and sculptural, the
neo-pagan sensuality of Italy expanded all its bloom.

For the artist at this period a Greek myth and a Christian legend were all
one. Both afforded the occasion for displaying technical skill in fluent
forms, devoid of any but voluptuous feeling; while both might be
subordinated to rich effects of decoration.[116] To this point the
intellectual culture of the fifteenth century had brought the plastic arts
of Italy, by a process similar to that which ended in the "Partus
Virginis" of Sannazzaro. They were still indisputably vigorous, and
working in accordance with the movement of the modern spirit. Yet the
synthesis they attempted to effect between heathenism and Christianity, by
a sheer effort of style, and by indifferentism, strikes us from the point
of view of art alone, not reckoning religion or morality, as
unsuccessful. Still, if it be childish on the one hand to deplore that the
Christian earnestness of the earlier masters had failed, it would be even
more ridiculous to complain that paganism had not been more entirely
recovered. The dou