We meet him again, unmistakable, but how different, in the realistic group of the "Thunderstricken,"--the long, lank youth, with spindle-shanks and egg-shaped body, bounding forward, with most grotesque strides, over the uncouth heap of dead bodies, ungainly masses with soles and nostrils uppermost, lying in beast-like confusion. This youth, with something of a harlequin in his jumps and in his ridiculous thin legs and preposterous round body, is evidently the model for the naked demi-gods of the "Resurrection" and the "Paradise:" he is the handsome boy as the fifteenth century gave him to Signorelli; opposite, he is the living youth of the fifteenth century idealized by the study of ancient sculpture; just as the "Thunderstricken" may be some scene of street massacre such as Signorelli may have witnessed at Cortona or Perugia, while the agonies of the "Hell" are the grouped and superb agonies taught by the antique; just as the two archangels of the "Hell," in their armour of Baglioni's heavy cavalry, may represent the modern element, and the same archangels, naked, with magnificent flying draperies, blowing the trumpets of the Resurrection, may show the antique element in Renaissance art. The antique influence was not, indeed, equally strong throughout Italy; it was strongest in the Tuscan school which, seeking for perfection of linear form, found that perfection in the antique; it was weakest in the Lombard and Venetian schools, which sought for what the antique could not give, light and shade and colour; the antique was most efficacious where it was most indispensable, and it was more necessary to a Tuscan, strong only with his charcoal or pencil than to Leonardo da Vinci, who could make an imperfect figure, smiling mysteriously from out of the gloom, more fascinating than the finest drawn Florentine Madonna, and could surround an insignificant childish head with the wondrous sheen and ripple of hair, as with an aureole of poetry; it was also less necessary to Giorgione and Titian, who could hide coarse limbs beneath their draperies of precious ruby, and transfigure, by the liquid gold of their palettes, a peasant woman into a goddess.
But even the Lombards, even the Venetians, required the antique influence. They could not perhaps have obtained it direct like the Tuscans; the colourists and masters of light and shade might never have understood the blank lines and faint shadows of the marble: they received the antique influence, strong but modified by the medium through which it had passed, from Mantegna; and the relentless self-sacrifice to antiquity, the self-paralyzation of the great artist, was not without its use; from Venetian Padua, Mantegna influenced the Bellini and Giorgione; from Lombard Mantua, he influenced Leonardo; and Mantegna's influence was that of the antique.