orgets
Leonardo; the narrower hesitating styles of the fifteenth century are
abandoned, as the great example is disseminated throughout Italy; and
even the tumult of angels in glory which the Lombard Correggio is to
paint in far-off Parma, and the daringly simple Bacchus and Ariadne with
which Tintoret will decorate the Ducal palace more than fifty years
later, all that is great and bold, all that is a re-incarnation of the
spirit of antiquity, all that marks the culmination of Renaissance art,
seems due to the impulse of Michel Angelo, and, through him, to the
example of Signorelli. From the celestial horseman and bounding avenging
angels of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of Sodoma, with
delicate limbs and exquisite head, rich with tendril-like locks against
the brown Umbrian sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated,
with the head and drapery of a Niobe, on the sack of flour in the
Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous goddess, with purple mantle half
concealing her body of golden white, who leans against the sculptured
fountain in Titian's "Sacred and Profane Love," with the greenish blue
sky and hazy light of evening behind her; from the most extreme
examples of the most extreme schools of Lombardy and Venetia, to the
most intense examples of the remotest schools of Tuscany and Umbria,
throughout the art of the early sixteenth century, of those thirty years
which were the years of perfection, we see, more or less marked, but
always distinct, the union of the living art born of the Middle Ages
with the dead art left by antiquity, a union producing life and
perfection, the great art of the Renaissance.

This much is clear and easy of definition; but what is neither clearly
understood nor clearly defined is the nature of this union, the manner
in which the antique and the modern did thus amalgamate. It is easy to
speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated
the modern; but all this explains but little; art is not a metaphysical
figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to
speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique
with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the
Renaissance of elements of civilization necessary for its perfection,
but not existing in the mediaeval civilization of the fifteenth century;
of elements of civilization which gave what the civilization of the
fifteenth century,--which could give col