From the pulpit of Niccola Pisano down to Mantegna’s ‘Triumph of Caesar,’ and the service Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this spirit can be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts—­the arts of arrested movement—­but its influence was to be seen also in the great Graeco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement of the gay courts of the time, and in the public pomps and processions with which the citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet the princes that chanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, which were considered so important that large prints were made of them and published—­a fact which is a proof of the general interest at the time in matters of such kind.—­The Truth of Masks.

THE ART OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfused into some form of art.  I have no desire to underrate the services of laborious scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lempriere’s Dictionary is of far more value to us than Professor Max Muller’s treatment of the same mythology as a disease of language.  Better Endymion than any theory, however sound, or, as in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic among adjectives!  And who does not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi’s book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’?  Art, and art only, can make archaeology beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life with the wonder of the unreal world.  But the sixteenth century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio also.  Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress of its neighbours.  Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and the amount of books published on national costumes is quite extraordinary.  At the beginning of the century the Nuremberg Chronicle, with its two thousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century was over seventeen editions were published of Munster’s Cosmography.  Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns, of Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from the hand of Titian.

Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their knowledge.  The development of the habit of foreign travel, the increased commercial intercourse between countries, and the frequency of diplomatic missions, gave every nation many opportunities of studying the various forms of contemporary dress.  After the departure from England, for instance, of the ambassadors from the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince of Morocco, Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in the strange attire of their visitors.  Later on London saw, perhaps too often, the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth came envoys from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, had an important influence on English costume.—­The Truth of Masks.