hem
that the essence of antiquity was to have no essence at all; no Ariostos
and Tassos have taught the world at large the real Ovidian conception,
the monumental allegoric nature and tendency to vacant faces and
sprawling, big-toed nudity of the heroes and goddesses as Giulio Romano
and the Caracci so well understood to paint them. For all the humanists
that hung about courts, the humanities had not penetrated much into
the Italian people. The imaginative form and colour was still purely
mediaeval; and the artists of the early Renaissance had to work out their
Ovidian stories for themselves, and work them out of their own material.
Hence the mythological creatures of these early painters are all, more
or less, gods in exile, with that charm of a long residence in the
Middle Ages which makes, for instance, the sweetheart of Ritter Tannhaeuser
so infinitely more seductive than the paramour of Adonis; that charm
which, when we meet it occasionally in literature, in parts of Spenser,
for instance, or in a play like Peel's "Arraignment of Paris," is so
peculiarly delightful.

These early painters have made up their Paganism for themselves, out of
all pleasant things they knew; their fancy has brooded upon it; and the
very details that make us laugh, the details coming direct from the
Middle Ages, the spirit in glaring opposition occasionally to that of
Antiquity, bring home to us how completely this Pagan fairyland is a
genuine reality to these men. We feel this in nearly all the work of
that sort--least, in the archaeological Mantegna's. We see it beginning
in the mere single figures--the various drawings of Orpheus, "Orpheus le
doux menestrier jouant de flutes et de musettes," as Villon called him,
much about that time--piping or fiddling among little toy animals out of
a Nuremberg box; the drawing of fauns carrying sheep, some with a queer
look of the Good Shepherd about them, of Pinturicchio; and rising to
such wonderful exhibitions (to me, with their obscure reminiscence of
pageants, they always seem like ballets) as Perugino's Ceiling of the
Cambio, where, among arabesqued constellations, the gods of antiquity
move gravely along: the bearded knight Mars, armed _cap-a-pie_ like a
mediaeval warrior; the delicate Mercurius, a beautiful page-boy stripped
of his emblazoned clothes; Luna dragged along by two nymphs; and Venus
daintily poised on one foot on her dove-drawn chariot, the exquisite
Venus in her clinging veils, c