In dramatic energy and intensity of expression he stands unrivalled by any but Michelangelo. Every variety of emotion, every passion that can swell the breast of man is included within the range of his experience. He knew where to seek the purest springs of joy, and in darker hours his strong soul had fathomed the lowest depths of the most unutterable anguish. The sportive dances of laughing cherubs and nymphs, the pleasures and pains of such mythical creatures as Tritons and Nereids, satyrs and sea-monsters, the sublime and rapt devotion of a Magdalen, the heroism of a Sebastian, were all familiar to him. He enters in the fullest manner into the exultant joy of the victors returning with their long array of spoils and captives from the fight, and yet in the midst of the mighty triumphal procession he pauses to show us the innocent child stretching out its little arms to its mother. But more than all he loved to paint the rage of violent passion, the wild gestures of uncontrollable grief. There are certain figures into which he seems to have concentrated either the tempest of the most ungovernable fury or the agony of the bitterest despair. Once seen, these creations of his brain refuse to loose their hold on our imaginations, and remain to haunt us with their terrible forms, just as the wailing St. John of “The Entombment” was ever present to Albrecht Dürer’s mind. The very greatness of Mantegna’s genius, its immense strength and power, may in itself be the cause that he is not strictly speaking a popular artist. His works have never been, perhaps they will never become, the enthusiastic object of general worship. But within the last few years the number of his admirers has increased steadily, and his high merit has received the fullest recognition from some of our most cultured writers. That this circle will widen year by year, as a larger number of students are drawn to examine for themselves those works of Mantegna which are fortunately within the reach of us all, we feel confident. It is scarcely necessary to add the expression of our conviction that to those who attentively consider them, no works yield a more genuine and lasting pleasure, while assuredly there are none that better repay the devotion of a life-long study. FRANCESCO RAIBOLINI CALLED FRANCIA [Illustration] [Illustration] FRANCIA. CHAPTER I. EARLY ART IN BOLOGNA, A.D. 1300-1450.