Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/270

188 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 to it, so that as you look 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 the greatest 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 to impart (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