ntiquity; and the study of the statue,
colourless, without light, shade, or perspective, interfered with, and
was interfered with by, the study of colour, of light and shade, of
perspective, and of all that a generation of painters would seek to
learn from Nature. Nor was this all; the influence of the civilization
of the Renaissance, of a civilization directly issued from the Middle
Ages, was entirely at variance with the influence of antique
civilization through the medium of ancient art; the Middle Ages and
antiquity, Christianity and Paganism, were even more opposed to each
other than could be the statue and the easel picture, the fresco and
the bas-relief.

First, then, we have the hostility between painting and sculpture,
between the _modus operandi_ of the modern and the _modus operandi_ of
the ancient art. Antique art is in the first place purely linear art,
colourless, tintless, without light and shade; next, it is essentially
the art of the isolated figure, without background, grouping, or
perspective. As linear art it could directly affect only that branch of
painting which was itself linear, and as art of the isolated figure it
was ever being contradicted by the constantly developing arts of
perspective and landscape. The antique never directly influenced the
Venetians, not from reasons of geography and culture, but from the fact
that Venetian painting, founded from the earliest times upon a system of
colour, could not be affected by antique sculpture, based upon a system
of modelled, colourless forms; the men who saw form only through the
medium of colour could not learn much from purely linear form; hence it
is that even after a certain amount of antique imitation had passed into
Venetian painting, through the medium of Mantegna, the Venetian painters
display comparatively little antique influence. In Bellini, Carpaccio,
Cima, and other early masters, the features, forms, and dress are mainly
modern and Venetian; and Giorgione, Titian, and even the eclectic
Tintoret were more interested in the bright lights of a steel
breastplate than in the shape of a limb, and preferred in their hearts a
shot brocade of the sixteenth century to the finest drapery modelled by
an ancient.

The antique influence was naturally strongest among the Tuscan schools;
because the Tuscan schools were essentially schools of drawing, and the
draughtsman only recognized in antique sculpture the highest perfection
of that linear form