At the same time he brought to the task a degree of culture rare among the men of his class, and both his friendship with scholars and antiquarians and his own classical studies were productive of the most important results for Italian painting. He is the chief representative in art of that revival of learning which was the leading intellectual impulse of the age; and, by bringing this influence to bear upon painting, he won a great step in the History of its development. First among the artists of the Renaissance, he saw with unerring instinct the path by which art would attain her final triumphs. Early in his career the conviction had forced itself upon his soul that the most perfect models of beauty are to be sought in antique art, but that this very perfection can only be reached by a minute and faithful study of nature. To reconcile anew these two principles, to combine in his work classic grace and human action, became the aim of his life, the task which he most nearly achieved in the “Triumphs”—although even there he is not always successful. “We are conscious,” wrote Goethe, “of a sense of conflict, but this conflict is surely the highest in which ever artist was engaged.” The perfect union of the two principles was to be effected by artists of the next generation, and where Mantegna had sown Raphael and Leonardo were to reap. It is this sense of conflicting elements, this occasional antagonism between the ideal form after which he strove and the actual fact present before his eyes, which has given rise to so much mistaken criticism of Mantegna’s work. By some critics of the very first rank he is called a mere realist, while on the other hand the old reproach that he neglected the study of real life to copy statues has been repeated till it has grown wearisome. Although it is easy to trace their origin, both charges are equally unjust. No man had ever a more thorough knowledge of nature, or was more keenly alive to the minutest details of everyday life around him. But something he felt was needed to lift this changeful scene, with its seething throng of human thought and action, into the atmosphere of perfect art. It is just that touch of grace, that power to ennoble and refine which the Greeks understood so well, that Mantegna felt and sought after in days of long and arduous toil. If at times a certain rigidity of form, a carelessness of desire to please, is visible in his work, it is because in his anxiety to obtain his end he occasionally omitted these minor matters. But to say that Mantegna was alike destitute of feeling for beauty and of spiritual perception appears to us simple blindness. In knowledge and mastery of the human form, in skill and finish of workmanship, in wealth of imagery and creative thought, few have ever surpassed him.