Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/272

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
190
HAMPTON COURT

the later hand. More trumpets herald the fifth picture, in which torches and candelabra are held aloft, and urns carried, while mighty elephants, richly caparisoned, close the scene. In the sixth, men carry vases on a stretcher, and behind them others bear helmets, shields, and breastplates, the arms of the vanquished. In nothing is Mantegna's mastery of detail and his appreciation of chaste classical design seen more clearly than in the armour which is the chief feature of this picture. In the seventh division are the captives, stately women, senators, children, with a wonderful dignity and resignation upon their faces. Behind are musicians and singers, soldiers with eagles and the emblems of the Roman state; and last of all, in a car which still preserves much of the beauty of the master's touch, comes the solemn Julius proud and unmoved, fit representative of the state which conquered the world. Before him a man holds up a medallion with the words Veni, Vidi, Vici; behind are men with incense-burners, and around are boys with branches of laurel.

No doubt the impressiveness of the whole picture is due not a little to the size. The small studies in grisaille at Vienna, undoubtedly not from Mantegna's hand, but designs for the woodcuts executed by Andrea Andreani in 1599, are clear and exquisite themselves as a sculptured frieze, but have not the dignity and solemn stateliness of this great work;[1] nor has the "Triumph of Scipio" in the National Gallery,

  1. Only eight of the drawings are now in the Vienna Gallery.