The leading feature which marks the work of all Squarcione’s scholars, and was to attain its highest artistic development in Mantegna’s later conceptions, is the sculptural treatment of form, which was a direct result of an exclusive study of ancient statues. Painting in their hands becomes more plastic than pictorial, the forms are sharply defined, the drapery falls in the small folds of ancient bas-relief, while the severity of the whole is relieved by rich decorations in the shape of festoons of fruit and foliage, which, when unskilfully managed, give a heavy and over-loaded effect. This plastic tendency sprang from the discovery, then first dawning upon the men of the Renaissance, that the principles of the highest art are to be found in the antique, and was so far as it went true and laudable in its aim. But in the case of the Squarcionesques this study of classic statuary was not combined with sufficient knowledge of nature, and, therefore, frequently degenerated into a lifeless rigidity and absence of expression, if not into positive ugliness and coarseness of form. This stiffness and want of vitality strike us at once in the four Evangelists on the ceiling of the chapel, wrongly ascribed by Vasari to Mantegna, and in the upper frescoes of St. Christopher’s life, attributed to three different artists—Marco Zoppo, Bono of Ferrara, and Ansuino of Forli. These last-named subjects are not without a considerable degree of skill in perspective and composition, but are alike marked by the same rigidity of form and metallic coldness of colouring. The feeblest of the three is Bono’s representation of St. Christopher bearing the child through the river, a work which, in awkwardness, incorrect drawing and truly painful ugliness, seems to exaggerate the worst faults of the Paduan school.