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

188 HAMPTON COURT
the old world had come to form and to mature his
style. A simple austere man in idea, if not always
in his life, which had something of the luxury as
well as the pride of old Rome, he was himself a
collector of antiquities, and it was his boast to have
assimilated the ideas of the great nameless artists
among whose works he delighted to live. " Good
ancient statues " Vasari tells us that he believed " were
more perfect and displayed more beauty in the different
parts than is shown by nature."
In such a painter it might seem that the design
was of supreme importance, and this at least is still
preserved to us in the " Triumph of Cæsar." It is the
extraordinary strength of the whole scheme, the overpowering
sense of mastery that it has — the power that
belongs toit, so that as youlook long the whole scene
seems to move, and you hear the steady tramp of
the soldiers, and the majestic appeal of the trumpets
as the mighty line sweeps on — it is its unique completeness
of impression that makes this great work
still one of thegreatest of the world. In the painting,
much if not everything is gone: the sweet faces of
Mantegna, with their chaste simplicity, are bedizened
with red cheeks and artificial smirks. The beautiful
expression, the pathos and tenderness, which he knew
so well how toimpart (as in his Madonna and Babe
in the National Gallery), have disappeared, but the
perfection of form remains.
The pictures appear to have been painted between
1485 and 1492 for the Mantuan Duke Ludovico