One of the greatest pioneer artists of the fifteenth century was Andrea Mantegna of Padua in the north of Italy.  More than any other painter of his day, he devoted himself to the study of ancient sculpture, even to the extent of sometimes painting in monochrome to imitate the actual marble.  Paintings by him, which look like sculptured reliefs, are in the National Gallery; and at Hampton Court is a series of cartoons representing the Triumph of Julius Caesar, in which the conception and the handling are throughout inspired by old Roman bas-reliefs.  In other pictures of his, the figures look as though cast of bronze, for he was likewise influenced by the sculptors of his own day, particularly by the Florentine Donatello, one of the geniuses of the early Renaissance.  Mantegna’s studies of form in sculpture made him an excellent draughtsman.  Strangely enough, it was this very severe artist who was, perhaps, the first to depict the charm of babyhood.  Often he draws his babes wrapped in swaddling clothes, with their little fingers in their mouths, or else in the act of crying, with their eyes screwed up tight, and their mouths wide open.  Such a combination of hard sculpturesque modelling with extreme tenderness of feeling has a charm of its own.

We have now just one more picture of a sacred subject to look at, one of the last that still retains much of the old beautiful religious spirit of the Middle Ages.  The painter of it, Sandro Botticelli, a Florentine, in whom were blended the piety of the Middle Ages and the intellectual life of the Renaissance, was a very interesting man, whose like we shall not find among the painters of his own or later days.  He was born in 1446, in Florence, the city in Italy most alive to the new ideas and the new learning.  Its governing family, the Medici, of whom you have doubtless read, surrounded themselves with a brilliant society of accomplished men, and adorned their palaces with the finest works of art that could be produced in their time.  The best artists from the surrounding country were attracted to Florence in the hope of working for the family, who were ever ready to employ a man of artistic gifts.

In such an atmosphere an original and alert person like Botticelli could not fail to keep step with the foremost of his day.  His fertile fancy was charmed by the revived stories of Greek Mythology, and for a time he gave himself up to the painting of pagan subjects such as the Birth of Venus from the Sea, and the lovely allegory of Spring with Venus, Cupid, and the Three Graces.  He was one of the early artists to break through the old wall of religious convention, painting frankly mythological subjects, and he did them in an exquisite manner all his own.