ays 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 spirting 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 his
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 charger of Paris browses beneath
some stunted larches; the Trojan knight's helmet, with its monstrous
beak and plume, lies on the ground; and near it reclines Paris himself,
lazy, in complete armour, with frizzled fashionable beard. To him, all
wrinkled and grinning with brutal lust, comes another bearded knight,
with wings to his vizored helmet, Sir Mercury, leading the three
goddesses, short, fat-cheeked German wenches, housemaids stripped of
their clothes, stupid, brazen, indifferent. And Paris is evidently
prepared with his choice: he awards the apple to the fattest, for among
a half-starved, plague-stricke