these great anatomists, so passionately curious of
internal structure, so exquisitely faithful to minute peculiarity, let
alone the bunglings of men so certain of their pencil, so exquisitely
keen to form, as Botticelli. As a matter of fact, every statue or drawn
figure of this period represents a hard fight with ignorance and with
unfamiliarity worse than ignorance. The grosser the failure hard-by, the
more splendid the real achievement. For every limb modelled truthfully
from the life, every gesture rendered correctly, every bone or muscle
making itself felt under the skin, every crease or lump in the surface,
is so much conquered from the unknown.

So long as this study, or rather this ignorance, continued, the antique
could be appreciated only very partially, and almost exclusively in the
points in which it differed least from the works of these modern men.
It must have struck them by its unerring science, its great truthfulness
to nature, but its superior beauty could not have appealed to artists
too unfamiliar with form to think of selecting it.

The study of antique proportion, the reproduction of antique types, so
visible in the sculptures of Michelangelo, of Cellini, and of Sansovino,
and no less in the painting of Raphael, of Andrea, and even of the later
Venetians, was very unimportant in the school of Donatello; and it is
probable that he and his pupils did not even perceive the difference
between their own works and the old marbles, which they studied merely
as so many realistic documents.

During his Florentine days Domenico Neroni, like his masters, was
unconscious of the real superiority of the antique, and blind to its
difference from what his contemporaries and himself were striving to
produce. He did not perceive that the David of Donatello and that of
Verrocchio were unlike the marble gods and heroes with whom he would
complacently compare them, nor that the bas-reliefs of the divine
Ghiberti were far more closely connected with the Gothic work of
Orcagna, even of the Pisans, than with those sculptured sarcophagi
collected by Cosimo and Piero dei Medici. It was only when his insatiate
curiosity had exhausted those problems of anatomy which had still
troubled his teachers that he was able to see what the antique really
was, or rather to see that the modern was not the same thing. Ghirlandaio,
Filippino, Signorelli, and Botticelli undoubtedly were affected by
a similar intuition of the Antique; but