Here, then, were the two great factors in the art of the Renaissance--the study of Nature, and the study of the antique; both understood slowly, imperfectly; the one counteracting the effect of the other; the study of Nature now scaring away all antique influence; the study of the antique now distorting all imitation of Nature; rival forces confusing the artist and marring the work, until, when each could receive its due, the one corrected the other, and they combined, producing by this marriage of the living reality with the dead but immortal beauty, the great art of Michel Angelo, of Raphael, and of Titian: double like its origin, antique and modern, real and ideal.
The study of the antique is thus placed opposite to the study of Nature, the comprehension of the works of antiquity is the momentary antagonist of the comprehension of Nature. And this may seem strange, when we consider that antique art was itself due to perfect comprehension of Nature. But the contradiction is easily explained. The study of Nature, as it was carried on in the Renaissance, comprised the study of effects which had remained unnoticed by antiquity; and the study of the statue, colourless, without light, shade, or perspective, interfered with, and was interfered with by, the study of colour, of light and shade, of perspective, and of all that a generation of painters would seek to learn from Nature. Nor was this all; the influence of the civilization of the Renaissance, of a civilization directly issued from the Middle Ages, was entirely at variance with the influence of antique civilization through the medium of ancient art; the Middle Ages and antiquity, Christianity and Paganism, were even more opposed to each other than could be the statue and the easel picture, the fresco and the bas-relief.
First, then, we have the hostility between painting and sculpture, between the _modus operandi_ of the modern and the _modus operandi_ of the ancient art. Antique art is in the first place purely linear art, colourless, tintless, without light and shade; next, it is essentially the art of the isolated figure, without background, grouping, or perspective. As linear art it could directly affect only that branch of painting which was itself linear, and as art of the isolated figure it was ever being contradicted by the constantly developing arts of perspective and landscape. The antique never directly influenced the Venetians, not from reasons of geography and culture, but from the fact that Venetian painting, founded from the earliest times upon a system of colour, could not be affected by antique sculpture, based upon a system of modelled, colourless forms; the men who saw form only through the medium of colour could not learn much from purely linear form; hence it is that even after a certain amount of antique imitation had passed into Venetian painting, through the medium of Mantegna, the Venetian painters display comparatively little antique influence. In Bellini, Carpaccio, Cima, and other early masters, the features, forms, and dress are mainly modern and Venetian; and Giorgione, Titian, and even the eclectic Tintoret were more interested in the bright lights of a steel breastplate than in the shape of a limb, and preferred in their hearts a shot brocade of the sixteenth century to the finest drapery modelled by an ancient.
