The minute learning accumulated in the fifteenth century upon the subject of Roman military life found noble illustration in his frieze of “Julius Caesar’s Triumph."[201] Nor is this masterpiece a cold display of pedantry.  The life we vainly look for in the frescoes of the Eremitani chapel may be found here—­statuesque, indeed, in style, and stately in movement, but glowing with the spirit of revived antiquity.  The processional pomp of legionaries bowed beneath their trophied arms, the monumental majesty of robed citizens, the gravity of stoled and veiled priests, the beauty of young slaves, and all the paraphernalia of spoils and wreaths and elephants and ensigns are massed together with the self-restraint of noble art subordinating pageantry to rules of lofty composition.  What must the genius of the man have been who could move thus majestically beneath the weight of painfully accumulated erudition, converting an antiquarian motive into a theme for melodies of line composed in the grave Dorian mood?

By no process can the classic purity of this bas-relief be better understood than by comparing the original with a transcript made by Rubens from a portion of the “Triumph."[202] The Flemish painter strives to add richness to the scene by Bacchanalian riot and the sensuality of imperial Rome.  His elephants twist their trunks, and trumpet to the din of cymbals; negroes feed the flaming candelabra with scattered frankincense; the white oxen of Clitumnus are loaded with gaudy flowers, and the dancing maidens are dishevelled Maenads.  But the rhythmic procession of Mantegna, modulated to the sound of flutes and soft recorders, carries our imagination back to the best days and strength of Rome.  His priests and generals, captives and choric women, are as little Greek as they are modern.  In them awakes to a new life the spirit-quelling energy of the republic.  The painter’s severe taste keeps out of sight the insolence and orgies of the empire; he conceives Rome as Shakspeare did in “Coriolanus."[203]

In compositions of this type, studied after bas-reliefs and friezes, Mantegna displayed a power that was unique.  Those who have once seen his drawings for Judith with the head of Holofernes, and for Solomon judging between the two mothers, will never forget their sculpture.  The lines are graven on our memory.  When this marble master chose to be tragic, his intensity was terrible.  The designs for a dead Christ carried to the tomb among the weeping Maries, concentrate within the briefest space the utmost agony; it is as though the very ecstasy of grief had been congealed and fixed for ever.  What, again, he could produce of purely beautiful within the region of religious art, is shown by his “Madonna of the Victory."[204] No other painter has given to the soldier saints forms at once so heroic and so chivalrously tender.