The antique influence was naturally strongest among the Tuscan schools; because the Tuscan schools were essentially schools of drawing, and the draughtsman recognized in antique sculpture the highest perfection of that linear form which was his own domain. Yet while the antique appealed most to the linear schools, even in these it could strongly influence only the purely linear part; it is strong in the drawings and weak in the paintings. As long as the artists had only the pencil or pen, they could reproduce much of the linear perfection of the antique; they were, so to speak, alone with it; but as soon as they brought in colour, perspective, and scenery, the linear perfection was lost in attempts at something new; the antique was put to flight by the modern. Botticelli's crayon study for his Venus is almost antique; his tempera picture of Venus, with the pale blue scaly sea, the laurel grove, the flower-embroidered garments, the wisps of tawny hair, is comparatively mediæval; Pinturicchio's sketch of Pans and satyrs contrasts strangely with his frescoes in the library of Siena; Mantegna himself, supernaturally antique in his engravings, becomes comparatively trivial and modern in his oil-paintings. Do what they might, draw from the antique and calculate its proportions, the artists of the Renaissance found themselves baffled as soon as they attempted to apply the result of then linear studies to coloured pictures; as soon as they tried to make the antique unite with the modern, one of the two elements was sure to succumb. In Botticelli, draughtsman and student though he was, the modern, the mediæval, that part of the art which had arisen in the Middle Ages, invariably had the upper hand; his Venus, despite her forms studied from the antique and her gesture imitated from some earlier discovered copy of the Medicean Venus, has the woe-begone prudery of a Madonna or of an abbess; she shivers physically and morally in her unaccustomed nakedness, and the goddess of Spring, who comes skipping up from beneath the laurel copse, does well to prepare her a mantle, for in the pallid tempera colour, against the dismal background of rippled sea, this mediæval Venus, at once indecent and prudish, is no very pleasing sight. In the Allegory of Spring in the Academy of Florence, we again have the antique; goddesses and nymphs whose clinging garments the gentle Sandro Botticelli has assuredly studied from some old statue of Agrippina or Faustina; but what strange livid tints are there beneath those draperies, what eccentric gestures are those of the nymphs, what a green, ghostlike light illumines this garden of Venus Are these goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as the ancients conceived, or are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines, incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer and mist?