What passes in the mind of that artist? What surprise, what dawning doubts, what sickening fears, what longings and what remorse are not the fruit of this sight of Antiquity? Is he to yield or to resist? Is he to forget the saints and Christ, and give himself over to Satan and to Antiquity? Only one man boldly answered, Yes. Mantegna abjured his faith, abjured the Middle Ages, abjured all that belonged to his time; and in so doing cast away from him the living art and became the lover, the worshipper of shadows. And only one man turned completely aside from the antique as from the demon, and that man was a saint, Fra Angelico da Fiesole. And with the antique, Fra Angelico rejected all the other artistic influences and aims of his time, the time not of Giotto or of Orcagna, but of Masaccio and Uccello, of Pollaiolo and Donatello. For the mild, meek, angelic monk dreaded the life of his days; dreaded to leave the cloister where the sunshine was tempered and the noise reduced to a mere faint hum, and where the flower-beds were tidy and prim; dreaded to soil or rumple his spotless white robe and his shining black cowl; a spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off the beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering at the thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break through the well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; the Renaissance did not exist for him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour and character, unsubstantial and unruffled; dreaming feebly and sweetly of transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath their robes; of smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid, vacant gaze, seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the purity of inanity; of divine dolls with pallid flaxen locks, floating between heaven and earth, playing upon lute and viol and psaltery; raised to faint visions of angels and blessed, moving noiseless, feelingless, meaningless, across the flowerets of Paradise; of assemblies of saints seated, arrayed in pure pink, and blue and lilac, in an atmosphere of liquid gold, in glory. And thus Fra Angelico worked on, content with the dearly purchased science of his masters, placid, beatic, effeminate, in an æsthetical paradise of his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a paradise for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes; patiently repeating the same fleshless angels, the same boneless saints, the same bloodless virgins; happy in smoothing the unmixed, unshaded tints of the sky, and earth, and dresses; laying on the gold of the fretted skies, and of the iridescent wings, embroidering robes, instruments of music, halos, flowers, with threads of gold.... Sweet, simple artist saint, reducing art to--something akin to the delicate pearl and silk embroidery of pious nuns, to the exquisite sweetmeat cookery of pious monks; a something too delicately gorgeous, too deliciously insipid for human wear or human food; no, the Renaissance does not exist for thee, either in its study of the existing reality, or in its study of antique beauty.