as though they had been painted from statues or clay models, carefully selected for the grandeur of their forms, the nobility of their attitudes, and the complicated beauty of their drapery.  The figures, arranged on different planes, are perfect in their perspective; the action is indicated by appropriate gestures, and the colouring, though faint and cold, is scientifically calculated.  Yet not a man or woman in these wondrous compositions seems to live.  Well provided with bone and muscle, they have neither blood nor anything suggestive of the breath of life within them.  It is as though Mantegna had been called to paint a people turned to stone, arrested suddenly amid their various occupations, and preserved for centuries from injury in some Egyptian solitude of dewless sand.

In spite of this unearthly immobility, the Paduan frescoes exercise a strange and potent spell.  We feel ourselves beneath the sway of a gigantic genius, intent on solving the severest problems of his art in preparation for the portraiture of some high intellectual abstraction.  It should also be observed that notwithstanding their frigidity and statuesque composure, the pictures of “S.  Andrew” and “S.  Christopher” in the chapel of the Eremitani reveal minute study of real objects.  Transitory movements of the body are noted and transcribed with merciless precision; an Italian hill-side, with its olive trees and winding ways and crown of turrets, forms the background of one scene; in another the drama is localised amid Renaissance architecture of the costliest style.  Rustic types have been selected for the soldiers, and commonplace details, down to a patched jerkin or a broken shoe, bear witness to the patience and the observation of the master.  But over all these things the glamour of Medusa’s head has fallen, turning them to stone.  We are clearly in the presence of a painter for whom the attractions of nature were subordinated to the fascinations of science—­a man the very opposite, for instance, to Benozzo Gozzoli.  If Mantegna had passed away in early manhood, like Masaccio, his fame would have been that of a cold and calculating genius labouring after an ideal unrealised except in its dry formal elements.

The truth is that Mantegna’s inspiration was derived from the antique.[199] The beauty of classical bas-relief entered deep into his soul and ruled his imagination.  In later life he spent his acquired wealth in forming a collection of Greek and Roman antiquities.[200] He was, moreover, the friend of students, eagerly absorbing the knowledge brought to light by Ciriac of Ancona, Flavio Biondo, and other antiquaries; and so completely did he assimilate the materials of scholarship, that the spirit of a Roman seemed to be re-incarnated in him.  Thus, independently of his high value as a painter, he embodies for us in art that sincere passion for the ancient world which was the dominating intellectual impulse of his age.