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

ANDREA MANTEGNA 187
know it, of the whole school, — his sense of form,
" plastic rather than pictorial," and his use of classical
ornaments and designs in the details of his pictures.
No one like him has ever turned a statue into a
picture. The same austerity of pose, the absence
of all triviality, the subordination of colour, of all
the outer world of nature, to the recognition of the
essential dignity of man, are in Mantegna's painting
— the reminiscences of what we see in the greatest
works of the classical sculptors. Thus his pictures
have an indefinable sense about them of purity and restraint,
and at the same time they show humanity, thus
simple and severe, as the master of terrestrial things.
Not the luxury, but the severity of Rome appealed
to him,
The moonofRome, chaste as the icicle
That's curdled by the frost from purest snow,
Andhangs on Dian's temple."
Mantegna was much more than a painter, though
as an artist he was supreme in technical excellence.
He was a historian and scholar, and it might almost
be said an architect. He took, as in the pictures at
Hampton Court, or the " Triumph of Scipio " at the
National Gallery, a well-defined but single subject
from ancient history, and he poured into it all the
knowledge that an antiquary could acquire. Statues,
busts, medallions, coins, inscriptions, reliefs, the decorations
of ancient columns and houses, the dignity of
great buildings, the minuteness of detail and the
sweep of great design — all these in the remains of