237. III. "The period when classical literature and art were again known in Italy, and the painters and sculptors, who had been gaining steadily in power for two hundred years--power not of practice merely, but of race also--with every circumstance in their favor around them, received their finally perfect instruction, both in geometrical science, in that of materials, and in the anatomy and action of the human body. Also the people about them--the models of their work--had been perfected in personal beauty by a chivalric war; in imagination by a transcendental philosophy; in practical intellect by stern struggle for civic law; and in commerce, not in falsely made or vile or unclean things, but in lovely things, beautifully and honestly made. And now, therefore, you get out of all the world's long history since it was peopled by men till now--you get just fifty years of perfect work. Perfect. It is a strong word; it is also a _true_ one. The doing of these fifty years is unaccusably Right, as art; what its sentiment may be--whether too great or too little, whether superficial or sincere--is another question, but as artists' work it admits no conception of anything better. "It is true that in the following age, founded on the absolutely stern rectitude of this, there came a phase of gigantic power and of exquisite ease and felicity which possess an awe and a charm of their own. They are more inimitable than the work of the perfect school. But they are not _perfect_." ... 238. This period Mr. Ruskin named "the 'Time of the Masters,' Fifty Years, including Luini, Leonardo, John Bellini, Vitto Carpaccio, Andrea Mantegna, Andrea Verrocchio, Cima da Conegliano, Perugino, and in date, though only in his earlier life, belonging to the school, Raphael.... The great fifty years was the prime of life of three men: John Bellini, born 1430, died at 90, in 1516; Mantegna, born 1430, died at 76, in 1506; and Vittor Carpaccio, who died in 1522."