In the foregoing chapters I have not sought to write again the history of art, so much as to keep in view the relation between Italian art and the leading intellectual impulses of the Renaissance.  In the masters of the sixteenth century—­Lionardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, and the Venetians—­the force inherent in the Italian genius for painting reached full development.  What remained was but an after-bloom rapidly tending to decadence.  To surpass those men in their own line seemed impossible.  What they had achieved was so transcendent that imitation satisfied their successors; and if they refused imitation, originality had to be sought by deviating into extravagances.  Meanwhile no new stock of thoughts had been acquired; and students of history are now well aware that for really great art ideas common to the nation are essential.  The motives suggested by mediaeval Christianity, after passing through successive stages of treatment in the quattrocento, had received the grand and humane handling of the golden age.  The motives of revived paganism in like manner were exhausted, and at this time the feeling for antiquity had lost its primal freshness.  It might seem superfluous to carry this inquiry further, when we have thus confessedly attained the culminating point of painting.  Yet the sketch attempted in this volume would be incomplete and liable to misinterpretation, if no account were taken of the legacy bequeathed to the next generation by the great masters.

Lionardo da Vinci formed, as we have seen, a school at Milan.  It was the special good fortune of his pupils that what he actually accomplished, bore no proportion to the suggestiveness of his teaching and the fertility of his invention.  Of finished work he left but little to the world; while his sketches and designs, the teeming thoughts of his creative brain, were an inestimable heritage.  The whole of this rich legacy of masterpieces, projected, but not executed, was characterised by a feeling for beauty which has fallen to no other painter.  When we examine the sketches in the Royal Collection at Windsor, we perceive that the exceeding sense of loveliness possessed by Lionardo could not have failed to animate his pupils with a high spirit of art.  At the same time the extraordinary variety of his drawing—­sometimes reminding us of German method, sometimes modern in the manner of French and English draughtsmen—­by turns bold and delicate, broad and minute in detail—­afforded to his school examples of perfect treatment in a multiplicity of different styles.  There was no formality of fixed unalterable precedent in Lionardo, nothing for his scholars to repeat with the monotony of mannerism.