death his estate had been involved in debt; and after his decease, his sons were forced to sell the pictures in his studio for the payment of pressing creditors.  He was buried in Alberti’s church of S. Andrea at Mantua, in a chapel decorated at his own expense.  Over the grave was placed a bronze bust, most noble in modelling and perfect in execution.  The broad forehead with its deeply cloven furrows, the stern and piercing eyes, the large lips compressed with nervous energy, the massive nose, the strength of jaw and chin, and the superb clusters of the hair escaping from a laurel-wreath upon the royal head, are such as realise for us our notion of a Roman in the days of the Republic.  Mantegna’s own genius has inspired this masterpiece, which tradition assigns to the medallist Sperando Maglioli.  Whoever wrought it, must have felt the incubation of the mighty painter’s spirit, and have striven to express in bronze the character of his uncompromising art.

Of a different temperament, yet not wholly unlike Mantegna in a certain iron strength of artistic character, was Luca Signorelli, born about 1441 at Cortona.  The supreme quality of Mantegna was studied purity of outline, severe and heightened style.  As Landor is distinguished by concentration above all the English poets who have made trial of the classic Muse, so Mantegna holds a place apart among Italian painters because of his stern Roman self-control.  Signorelli, on the contrary, made his mark by boldness, pushing experiment almost beyond the verge of truth, and approaching Michael Angelo in the hardihood of his endeavour to outdo nature.  Vasari says of him, that “even Michael Angelo imitated the manner of Luca, as every one can see;” and indeed Signorelli anticipated the greatest master of the sixteenth century, not only in his profound study of human anatomy, but also in his resolution to express high thought and tragic passion by pure form, discarding all the minor charms of painting.  Trained in the severe school of Piero della Francesca, he early learned to draw from the nude with boldness and accuracy; and to this point, too much neglected by his predecessors, he devoted the full powers of his maturity.  Anatomy he practised, according to the custom of those days, in the graveyard or beneath the gibbet.  There is a drawing by him in the Louvre of a stalwart man carrying upon his back the corpse of a youth.  Both are naked.  The motive seems to have been taken from some lazar-house.  Life-long study of perspective in its application to the drawing of the figure, made the difficulties of foreshortening and the delineation of brusque attitude mere child’s play to this audacious genius.  The most rapid movement, the most perilous contortion of bodies falling through the air or flying, he depicted with hard, firmly-traced, unerring outline.  If we dare to criticise the productions of a master so original and so accomplished, all we can say is that Signorelli revelled almost too wantonly in the display of hazardous posture, and that he sacrificed the passion of his theme to the display of science.[207] Yet his genius comprehended great and tragic subjects, and to him belongs the credit in an age of ornament and pedantry of having made the human body a language for the utterance of all that is most weighty in the thought of man.