ately
following generations could only spoil, but not improve upon them; they
were also, if we consider the matter, the only pictorial representations
of Scripture histories possible until art had acquired those new powers
of foreshortening, and light and shade and perspective, which were
sought for only after the complete attainment of the more elementary
powers which the Giottesques never fully possessed. Let us ask ourselves
how, in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, any notable change in
general arrangement of any well-known Scripture subject could well have
been introduced; and, in order to do so, let us realise one or two cases
where the same subjects have been treated by later masters. Tintoretto's
Last Judgment, where the Heavenly Hosts brood, poised on their wings,
above the river of hell which hurries the damned down its cataracts, is
impossible so long as perspective and foreshortening will barely admit
(as is the case up to the end of the fifteenth century), of figures
standing firmly on the ground and being separated into groups at various
distances. In Rembrandt's and Terburg's Adoration of the Shepherds, the
light emanates from the infant Christ; in Ribera's magnificent Deposition
from the Cross, the dead Saviour and His companions are represented,
not, as in the Entombments of Perugino and Raphael, in the open air,
but in the ghastly light of the mouth of the sepulchre. These are new
variations upon the hackneyed themes, but how were they possible so long
as the problems of light and shade were limited (as was the case even
with Leonardo), to giving the modelling, rather in form than in colour,
of a face or a limb? One of the earliest and greatest innovations is
Signorelli's treatment of the Resurrection in the chapel of San Brizio,
at Orvieto; he broke entirely with the tradition (exemplified particularly
by Angelico) of making the dead come fully fleshed and dressed as in
their lifetime from under the slabs of a burial place, goaded by grotesque
devils with the snouts and horns of weasels and rams, with the cardboard
masks of those carnival mummers who gave the great pageant of Hell
mentioned by old chroniclers. But Signorelli's innovation, his naked
figures partially fleshed and struggling through the earth's crust, his
naked demons shooting through the air and tying up the damned, could
not possibly have been executed or even conceived until his marvellous
mastery of the nude and of the anatomy of