What would have been the art of the Renaissance without the antique? The speculation is vain, for the antique had influenced it, had been goading it on ever since the earliest times; it had been present at its birth, it had affected Giotto through Niccoto Pisano, and Masaccio through Ghiberti; the antique influence cannot be conceived as absent in the history of Italian painting. So far, as a study of the impossible, the speculation respecting the fate of Renaissance art had it not been influenced by the antique would be childishly useless. But lest we forget that this antique influence did exist, lest, grown ungrateful and blind, we refuse it its immense share in producing Michel Angelo, Raphael, and Titian, we may do well to turn to an art born and bred like Italian art, in the Middle Ages; like it, full of strength and power of self-development, but which, unlike Italian art, was not influenced by the antique. This art is the great German art of the early sixteenth century; the art of Martin Schongauer, of Aldegrever, of Graf, of Wohlgemuth, of Pencz, of Zatzinger, of Kranach, and of the great Albrecht Dürer, whom they resemble as Pinturricchio, and Lo Spagna resemble Perugino, as Palma and Pario Bordone resemble Titian. This is an art born in a civilization less perfect indeed than that of Italy, narrower, as Nürnberg is narrower than Florence, but resembling it in habits, dress, religion, above all the main characteristic of being mediæval; and its masters, as great as their Italian contemporaries in all the technicalities of the art, and in absolute honesty of endeavour, may show what the Italian art of the sixteenth century might have been without the antique. Let us therefore open a portfolio of those wonderful minute yet grand engravings of the old Germans. They are for the most part Scriptural scenes or allegories, quite analogous to those of the Italians, but purely realistic, conscious of no world beyond that of an Imperial City of the year 1500. Here we have the whole turn-out, male and female, of a German free town, in the shape of scenes from the lives of the Virgin and saints; here are short fat burghers, with enormous blotchy, bloated faces and little eyes set in fat, their huge stomachs protruding from under their jackets; here are blear-eyed ladies, tall, thin, wrinkled though not old, with figures like hungry harpies, stalking about in high headgears and stiff gowns, or sitting by the side of lean and stunted pages, singing (with dolorous voice) to lutes; or promenading under trees with long-shanked, high-shouldered gentlemen, with vacant sickly face and long scraggy hairs and beard, their bony elbows sticking out of their slashed doublets. These courtly figures culminate in Dürer's magnificent plate of the wild man of the woods kissing the hideous, leering Jezebel in her brocade and jewels. These aristocratic women are terrible; prudish, malicious, licentious, never modest because they are always ugly.