This anomaly, this unsatisfactory character of the works of both Botticelli and Mantegna, is mainly technical; the antique is frustrated in Botticelli, not so much by the Christian, the mediæval, the modern mode of feeling, as by the new methods and aims of the new art which disconcert the methods and aims of the old art; and that which arrests Mantegna in his development as a painter is not the spirit of paganism deadening the spirit of Christianity, but the laws of sculpture hampering painting. But this technical contest between two arts, the one not yet fully developed, the other not yet fully understood, is as nothing compared with the contest between the two civilizations, the antique and the modern; between the habits and tendencies of the contemporaries of the artists of the Renaissance and of the artists themselves, and the habits and tendencies of the antique artists and their contemporaries. We are apt to think of the Renaissance as of a period closely resembling antiquity, misled by the inevitable similarity between southern and democratic countries of whatever age; misled still less pardonably by the Ciceronian pedantries and pseudo-antique obscurities of a few humanists, and by the pseudo-Corinthian arabesques and capitals of a few learned architects. But all this was mere archæological finery borrowed by a civilization in itself entirely unlike that of ancient Greece.
The Renaissance, let us remember, was merely the flowering time of that great mediæval movement which had germinated early in the twelfth century; it was merely a more advanced stage of the civilization which had produced Dante and Giotto, of the civilization which was destined to produce Luther and Rabelais. The fifteenth century was merely the continuation of the fourteenth century, as the fourteenth had been of the thirteenth; there had been growth and improvement; development of the more modern, diminishing of the more mediæval elements; but, despite growth and the changes due to growth, the Renaissance was part and parcel of the Middle Ages. The life, thought, aspirations, and habits were mediæval, opposed to the open-air life, the physical training, and the materialistic religion of antiquity. The surroundings of Masaccio and of Signorelli, nay, even of Raphael, were very different from those of Phidias or Praxiteles. Let us think what were the daily and hourly impressions given by the Renaissance to its artists. Large towns, in which thousands of human beings were crowded together, in narrow, gloomy streets, with but a strip of blue visible between the projecting roofs; and in these cities an incessant commercial activity, with no relief save festivals at the churches, brawls at the taverns, and carnival buffooneries. Men and women pale and meagre for want of air, and light, and movement; undeveloped, untrained bodies, warped by constant work at the loom or at the desk, at best with the lumpish freedom of the soldier and the vulgar nimbleness of the 'prentice. And these men and women dressed in the dress of the Middle Ages, gorgeous perhaps in colour, but heavy, miserable, grotesque, nay, sometimes ludicrous in form; citizens in lumpish robes and long-tailed caps; ladies in stiff and foldless brocade hoops and stomachers; artisans in striped and close-adhering hose and egg-shaped padded jerkin; soldiers in lumbering armour-plates, ill-fitted over ill-fitting leather, a shapeless shell of iron, bulging out and angular, in which the body was buried as successfully as in the robes of the magistrates. Thus we see the men and women of the Renaissance in the works of all its painters; heavy in Ghirlandajo, vulgarly jaunty in Fillipino, preposterously starched and prim in Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; and mediæval stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo Gozzoli's Building of Babel.