Hampton Court ... Illustrated with forty-three drawings by Herbert ...

186 HAMPTON COURT
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