the ancients conceived, or
are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines,
incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer and mist?

In Sandro Botticelli the teachings of the statue are forgotten or
distorted when the artist takes up his palette and brushes; in his far
greater contemporary, Andrea Mantegna, the ever-present antique chills
and arrests the vitality of the modern. Mantegna, the pupil of the
ancient marbles of Squarcione's workshop even more than the pupil of
Donatello, studies for his paintings not from Nature, but from
sculpture; his figures are seen in strange projection and
foreshortening, like figures in a high relief seen from below; despite
his mastery of perspective, they seem hewn out of the background;
despite the rich colours which he displays in his Veronese altar-piece,
they look like painted marbles, with their hard clots of stone-like hair
and beard, with their vacant glance and their wonderful draperies,
clinging and weighty like the wet draperies of ancient sculpture. They
are beautiful petrifactions, or vivified statues; Mantegna's
masterpiece, the sepia "Judith" in Florence, is like an exquisite,
pathetically lovely Eurydice, who has stepped unconscious and lifeless
out of a Praxitelian bas-relief. And there are stranger works than even
the Judith; strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine
Monsters and the Bacchanal among Mantegna's engravings. The group of
three wondrous creatures, at once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and
even more fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard: a Triton,
sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and hair, wheels round his
finned horse, preparing to strike his adversary with a bunch of fish
which he brandishes above him; on him is rushing, careering on an
osseous sea-horse, a strange, lank, sinewy being, fury stretching every
tendon, his long clawed feet striking into the flanks of his steed, his
sharp, reed-crowned head turned fiercely, with clenched teeth, on his
opponent, and stretching forth a truncheon, ready to run down his enemy
as a ship runs down another; and further off a young Triton, with
clotted hair and heavy eyes, seems ready to sink wounded below the
rippling wavelets, with the massive head and marble agony of the dying
Alexander; enigmatic figures, grand and grotesque, lean, haggard,
vehement, and yet, in the midst of violence and monstrosity,
unaccountably antique. The other print, called the Bacchanal,