In the Grand Style the accent was on maturity, decorum, and measured power. Vivacious and picturesque incidents are eschewed. The new art demands simplicity and centrality. The human figure dominates the compositions. The frame is filled densely with a complicated group. The figures themselves are ample and mature. The Madonna is no longer a girl, but a gracious woman of thirty years. The Christ Child is no longer an infant, but a well-grown lad, whose supple curves harmonize with those of grown folks. As to pose, the figures no longer are casually arranged or in some posture required by a specific action. They are cast in conventional poses which bring out the active beauty of the body. Heads swing across shoulders, the upper body turns against the thrust of the lower, the arms counter the action of the legs. Such counterpoise is always active, implying motion. Straight lines give way to weavings of S curves—so many springs whose tension is kept equal. Violent motion or torsion of the body is frequent, but one motion or torsion must be immediately taken up and balanced by some equivalent. Following the general principle of centrality, colors are fewer and more studied. In portraiture, for example, we no longer have landscape or elaborate interiors, but plain dark backgrounds. At all points we have left spontaneity and happy accident behind and have entered a world of exquisite calculation. Society had moved with art towards ideals of simplicity and decorum. You no longer find the braided, beribboned and jewelled coiffures of Botticelli’s women, but serene brows with the hair drawn back evenly from its part and disposed as a mass in a net. Young gallants wear their abundant locks much the same way and sport seignorial spade beards. Old men are even more magnificently provided with beards of monumental scale. Such men are clothed no longer in parti-colored raiment, but in richly sober black. The ideal is dignity, composure, and magnanimity. You may trace it through all its intricacies of casuistry in what is still one of the best pictures of what a gentleman and lady should be, the _Cortegiano_ of Baldassare Castiglione. It was finished in 1516 while his friend Raphael was designing the tapestry cartoons. And you may read much of this high teaching in Count Castiglione’s own sensitive and comprehending face, Figure 167, as Raphael then painted it. It breathes that fine interplay of pride and humility which was the mainspring of the Renaissance, and it brings us back to the double origin of the Grand Style in the pride of Florence and the humility of Umbria.