The subdivisions I have just suggested correspond to two distinct stages in the evolution of art.  The painters of the earlier group win our admiration quite as much by their aim as by their achievement.  Their achievement, indeed, is not so perfect but that they still make some demand upon interpretative sympathy in the student.  There is, besides, a sense of reserved strength in their work.  We feel that their motives have not been developed to the utmost, that their inspiration is not exhausted; that it will be possible for their successors to advance beyond them on the same path, not realising more consummate excellence in special points, but combining divers qualities, and reaching absolute freedom.

The painters of the second group display mastery more perfect, range of faculty more all-embracing.  What they design they do; nature and art obey them equally; the resources placed at their command are employed with facile and unfettered exercise of power.  The hand obedient to the brain is now so expert that nothing further is left to be desired in the expression of the artist’s thought.[197] The student can only hope to penetrate the master’s meaning.  To imagine a step further in the same direction is impossible.  The full flower of the Italian genius has been unfolded.  Its message to the world in art has been delivered.

Chronology alone would not justify us in drawing these distinctions.  What really separates the two groups is the different degree in which they severally absorbed the spirit and uttered the message of their age.  In the former the Renaissance was still immature, in the latter it was perfected.  Yet all these painters deserve in a true sense to be called its children.  Their common object is art regarded as an independent function, and relieved from the bondage of technical impediments.  In their work the liberty of the modern mind finds its first and noblest expression.  They deal with familiar and time-honoured Christian motives reverently; but they use them at the same time for the exhibition of pure human beauty.  Pagan influences yield them spirit-stirring inspiration; yet the antique models of style, which proved no less embarrassing to their successors than Saul’s armour was to David, weigh lightly, like a magician’s breast-plate, upon their heroic strength.

Andrea Mantegna was born near Padua in 1431.  Vasari says that in his boyhood he herded cattle, and it is probable that he was the son of a small Lombard farmer.  What led him to the study of the arts we do not know; but that his talents were precociously developed, is proved by his registration in 1441 upon the books of the painter’s guild at Padua.  He is there described as the adopted son of Squarcione.  At the age of seventeen he signed a picture with his name.  Studying the casts and drawings collected by Squarcione for his Paduan school, the young Mantegna found congenial exercise for his peculiar gifts.[198] His early frescoes in the Eremitani at Padua look