than the pigments with which it is associated.  The whole scheme leaves a grave harmonious impression on the mind, thoroughly in keeping with the sublimity of the thoughts expressed.  No words can describe the beauty of the flesh-painting, especially in the figures of the Genii, or the technical delicacy with which the modelling of limbs, the modulation from one tone to another, have been carried from silvery transparent shades up to the strongest accents.

VI

Mr. Ruskin has said, and very justly said, that “the highest art can do no more than rightly represent the human form.”  This is what the Italians of the Renaissance meant when, through the mouths of Ghiberti, Buonarroti, and Cellini, they proclaimed that the perfect drawing of a fine nude, “un bel corpo ignudo,” was the final test of mastery in plastic art.  Mr. Ruskin develops his text in sentences which have peculiar value from his lips.  “This is the simple test, then, of a perfect school—­that it has represented the human form so that it is impossible to conceive of its being better done.  And that, I repeat, has been accomplished twice only:  once in Athens, once in Florence.  And so narrow is the excellence even of these two exclusive schools, that it cannot be said of either of them that they represented the entire human form.  The Greeks perfectly drew and perfectly moulded the body and limbs, but there is, so far as I am aware, no instance of their representing the face as well as any great Italian.  On the other hand, the Italian painted and carved the face insuperably; but I believe there is no instance of his having perfectly represented the body, which, by command of his religion, it became his pride to despise and his safety to mortify.”

We need not pause to consider whether the Italian’s inferiority to the Greek’s in the plastic modelling of human bodies was due to the artist’s own religious sentiment.  That seems a far-fetched explanation for the shortcomings of men so frankly realistic and so scientifically earnest as the masters of the Cinque Cento were.  Michelangelo’s magnificent cartoon of Leda and the Swan, if it falls short of some similar subject in some gabinetto segreto of antique fresco, does assuredly not do so because the draughtsman’s hand faltered in pious dread or pious aspiration.  Nevertheless, Ruskin is right in telling us that no Italian modelled a female nude equal to the Aphrodite of Melos, or a male nude equal to the Apoxyomenos of the Braccio Nuovo.  He is also right in pointing out that no Greek sculptor approached the beauty of facial form and expression which we recognise in Raffaello’s Madonna di San Sisto, in Sodoma’s S. Sebastian, in Guercino’s Christ at the Corsini Palace, in scores of early Florentine sepulchral monuments and pictures, in Umbrian saints and sweet strange portrait-fancies by Da Vinci.