GERMAN SCHOOLS OF ENGRA V1NG. 325 



Holbein and Botticelli determining for you, without need of 

 any farther range, the principal questions of moment in the 

 relation of the Northern and Southern schools of design. 

 Nay, a wider method of inquiry would only render your com- 

 parison Jess accurate in result. It is only in Holbein's majestic 

 range of capacity, and only in the particular phase of Teutonic 

 life which his art adorned, that the problem can be dealt with 

 on fair terms. We Northerns can advance no fairly compara- 

 ble antagonist to the artists of the South, except at that one 

 moment, and in that one man. Rubens cannot for an instant 

 be matched with Tintoret, nor Memling with Lippi ; while 

 Reynolds only rivals Titian in what he learned from him. 

 But in Holbein and Botticelli we have two men trained in- 

 dependently, equal in power of intellect, similiar in material 

 and mode of work, contemporary in age, correspondent in 

 disposition. The relation between them is strictly typical of 

 the constant aspects to each other of the Northern and South- 

 ern schools. 



142. Their point of closest contact is in the art of engrav- 

 ing, and this art is developed entirely as the servant of the 

 great passions which perturbed or polluted Europe in the 

 fifteenth century. The impulses which it obeys are all new ; 

 and it obeys them with its own nascent plasticity of temper. 

 Painting and sculpture aire only modified by them ; but en- 

 graving is educated. 



These passions are in the main three ; namely, 



1. The thirst for classical literature, and the forms of proud 



and false tastes which arose out of it, in the position it 

 had assumed as the enemy of Christianity. 



2. The pride of science, enforcing (in the particular do- 



main of Art) accuracy of perspective, shade, and anat- 

 omy, never before dreamed of. 



3. The sense of error and iniquity in the theological teach- 



ing of the Christian Church, felt by the highest intel- 

 lects of the time, and necessarily rendering the formerly 

 submissive religious art impossible. 



