of Greek art yield to a passionate and trenchant realisation of the actual romance.  The most thrilling moments in the legend are selected for dramatic treatment, grace and beauty being exchanged for vivid presentation.  A whole cycle of human experience separates these medallions from the antique bas-relief at Naples, where Hermes hands the veiled Eurydice to Orpheus, and all three are calm.  That Signorelli, if he chose to do so, could represent a classic myth with more of classic feeling, is shown by his picture of “Pan Listening to Olympus"[215].  The nymph, the vineleaf-girdled Faun, and the two shepherds, all undraped and drawn with subtle feeling for the melodies of line, render this work one of his most successful compositions.

It would be interesting to compare Signorelli’s treatment of the antique with Mantegna’s or Botticelli’s.  The visions of the pagan world, floating before the mind of all men in the fifteenth century, found very different interpreters in these three painters—­Botticelli adding the quaint alloy of his own fancy, Signorelli imparting the semi-savagery of a terrible imagination, Mantegna, with the truest instinct and the firmest touch, confining himself to the processional pageantry of bas-relief.  Yet, were this comparison to be instituted, we could hardly refrain from carrying it much further.  Each great master of the Renaissance had his own relation to classical mythology.  The mystic sympathies of “Leda and the Swan,” as imaged severally by Lionardo and Michael Angelo; Correggio’s romantic handling of the myths of “Danae” and “Io;” Titian’s and Tintoretto’s rival pictures of “Bacchus and Ariadne;” Raphael’s “Galatea;” Pollajuolo’s “Hercules;” the “Europa” of Veronese; the “Circe” of Dosso Dossi; Palma’s “Venus;” Sodoma’s “Marriage of Alexander”—­all these, to mention none but pictures familiar to every traveller in Italy, raise for the student of the classical Revival absorbing questions relative to the influences of pagan myths upon the modern imagination.

Signorelli was chiefly occupied, during the course of his long career, upon religious pictures; and the high place he occupies in the history of Renaissance culture is due partly to his free abandonment of conventional methods in treating sacred subjects.  The Uffizzi Gallery contains a circular “Madonna” by his hand, with a row of naked men for background—­the forerunner of Michael Angelo’s famous “Holy Family.”  So far had art for art’s sake already encroached upon the ecclesiastical domain.  To discuss Signorelli’s merits as a painter of altar-pieces would be to extend the space allotted to him far beyond its proper limits.  It is not as a religious artist that he takes his rank, but as having powerfully promoted the rehabilitation of the body achieved for art by the Renaissance.