which was his own domain. The antique not only
appealed most to the linear schools, but even in them it could strongly
influence only the purely linear part; it is strong in the drawings and
weak in the paintings. As long as the artists had only the pencil or
pen, they could reproduce much of the linear perfection of the antique;
they were, so to speak, alone with it; but as soon as they brought in
colour, perspective, and scenery, the linear perfection was lost in
attempts at something new; the antique was put to flight by the modern.
Botticelli's crayon study for his Venus is almost antique, his tempera
picture of Venus, with the pale blue scaly sea, the laurel grove, the
flower-embroidered garments, the wisps of tawny hair, is comparatively
mediaeval; Pinturricchio's sketch of fauns and satyrs contrasts strangely
with his frescos in the library of Silena; Mantegna himself,
supernaturally antique in his engravings, becomes almost trivial and
modern in his oil paintings. Do what they might, draw from the antique,
calculate its proportions, the artists of the Renaissance found
themselves baffled as soon as they attempted to apply the result of
their linear studies to coloured pictures; as soon as they tried to
make the antique unite with the modern, one of the two elements was sure
to succumb. In Botticelli, draughtsman and student though he was, the
modern, the mediaeval, that part of the art which had arisen in the
Middle Ages, invariably had the upper hand; his Venus has, despite her
forms studied from the antique and her gesture imitated from some
earlier discovered copy of the Medicean Venus, the woe-begone prudery of
a Madonna or of an abbess; she shivers physically and morally in her
unaccustomed nakedness, and the goddess of Spring, who comes skipping up
from beneath the laurel copse, does well to prepare her a mantle, for in
the paled tempera colour, against the dismal background of rippled sea,
this mediaeval Venus, at once indecent and prudish, is no pleasing sight.
In the Allegory of Spring in the Academy of Florence, we again have the
antique; goddesses and nymphs whose clinging garments the gentle Sandro
Botticelli has assuredly studied from some old statue of Agrippina or
Faustina; but what strange livid tints are there beneath those
draperies, what eccentric gestures are those of the nymphs, what a
green, ghostlike light illumines the garden of Venus! Are these
goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as