Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/269

Rh 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,

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