Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/273

Rh masterpiece though it is of historical accuracy and skilful arrangement. There are other copies of the "Triumph of Cæsar," but I have not seen them. The Vienna work, in the clearness with which every scene can be traced and every design understood, and the Hampton Court pictures for their size and magnificence, may well represent to us what Mantegna meant in what was probably his greatest memorial of old Rome. The severity, the power of it all, is what impresses: the virile domination, the invincible air of mastery. The soldiers may keep tune to the soft music of flutes, but we see that they have come from sterner music. They remind one irresistibly of "Coriolanus" or of Handel's marches and songs of triumph. One would think that Charles I., keenest of Shakespeare's lovers, read his "Julius Cæsar" in the light of this picture. The stately Romans who triumph in it are each of them men such as the Brutus who loved not Cæsar less but Rome more, or the Coriolanus to whom Rome's honour and his own pride were one; and Handel may surely have looked on it when he wrote "See the conquering hero comes."

How differently the classical age appeals to different men may be seen if we turn from the magnificent stateliness of the fifth of these pictures to Rubens' imitation of it in the National Gallery. To the Fleming the glory of triumph means luxury and joy: to the staid master of the Paduan school it is stern simplicity even in its greatest success.