Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/268

it would be impossible to over-estimate. It represents the strength of the Renaissance, and that strange feature of it, as it seems to us—though it is not so rare a feature as some would suppose—its austerity. In descriptions of luxurious despots, sensuous popes, pedantic scholars, we are ready to forget the ideal which the best minds of the great revival of learning set before them. If Greece appealed to the imagination of the fifteenth century from the side of its free delight in life, its sense of the beauty of form, of the essential dignity of man as man, of the width and the satisfying power of any human interest, yet the solemnity, the justice, the impressive authority of Rome was little less attractive. The Roman ideal of political life was quoted even when it was not followed; the stateliness, the majesty, the formal pomp of old Roman society set the fashion for Italian courts, and gave a tone to many a poet and many a painter. And the greatest of all those whom Rome influenced was Andrea Mantegna. Few men knew more of its history, no one caught so much of its spirit. The story of the influences which made him so great a master will bear telling again. Squarcione was the founder of the school of learned painters which grew up under the shadow of the University of Padua, and gave itself to the study of ancient sculpture, and to the realisation of its principles in painting. Mantegna, his pupil (1431-1506), was the greatest master of the school. Two characteristics of his work are those, so far as we