Born at Feltre, Vittorino went as a youth to Padua, one of the leading humanistic centres at the end of the fourteenth century. After a period as Professor of Rhetoric, the ruling Gonzaga invited Vittorino to Mantua to educate his children. This was in 1425, and Vittorino remained there until his death in 1446. His first step was to abolish the luxury which had environed the young Gonzagas. He made “The House of Joy” a seat of plain living and regular study. Youths from other courts flocked to Mantua. At his own expense, Vittorino maintained a number of poor scholars, who lived near the villa and shared in all the privileges of the school. Music and such elementary sciences as geometry and astronomy were taught, in true Hellenic fashion. The Latin classics were studied without the fantastic pedantries of the ecclesiastical era. The grand truth was accepted that every man was possessed of a free but responsible personality. Each one saw that his task in this world was to mould his individuality, and by the exercise of his own free will to prove how far he was above the brutes. The one end of education was to make the boy or girl, not a specialist, but a perfectly developed man or woman. The expert had no place in Italy in those days. Throughout the Renaissance all education aimed at the production of all-round men and women, physically, emotionally, and intellectually sound. It needs little imagination to see the effect of this general acceptance of Greek ideals of life and conduct upon sculpture. It rendered possible the production of hundreds of statues which would have been meaningless a century earlier. Beyond this we may not go. Every vital art must be largely indebted to the Greek tradition, and Renaissance sculpture was no exception. But, in the end, a great style cannot be transferred. A second-hand style, like a second-hand coat, is apt to be an ill-fit. Taking a few typical fifteenth-century sculptures we do not say “how Greek they are.” On the contrary, it is at once apparent that the difference underlying Italian and Greek sculpture is far more noticeable than any external resemblance.