Renaissance in Italy, Volume 3 (of 7) · Chapter 7Niccola Pisano—Obscurity of the Sources for a History of Early Italian Sculpture—Vasari's Legend of Pisano—Deposition from the Cross at Lucca—Study of Nature and the Antique—Sarcophagus at Pisa—Pisan
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Luca was apprenticed in his youth to a goldsmith; but of what he wrought before the age of forty-five, we know but little.[97] At that time his faculty had attained full maturity, and he produced the groups of dancing children and choristers intended for the organ gallery of the Duomo. Wholly free from affectation, and depending for effect upon no merely decorative detail, these bas-reliefs deserve the praise bestowed by Dante on the sculpture seen in Purgatory:[98]—
Dinanzi a noi pareva si verace,
Quivi intagliato in un atto soave,
Che non sembrava immagine che tace.
Movement has never been suggested in stone with less exaggeration, nor have marble lips been made to utter sweeter and more varied music. Luca's true perception of the limits to be observed in sculpture, appears most eminently in the glazed terra-cotta work by which he is best known. An ordinary artist might have found the temptation to aim at showy and pictorial effects in this material overwhelming. Luca restrained himself to pure white on pale blue, and preserved an exquisite simplicity of line in all his compositions. There is an almost unearthly beauty in the profiles of his Madonnas, a tempered sweetness in the modulation of their drapery and attitude, that prove complete mastery in the art of rendering evanescent moments of expression, the most fragile subtleties of the emotions that can stir a tranquil spirit. Andrea della Robbia, the nephew of Luca, with his four sons, Giovanni, Luca, Ambrogio, and Girolamo, continued to manufacture the glazed earthenware of Luca's invention. These men, though excellent artificers, lacked the fine taste of their teacher. Coarser colours were introduced; the eye was dazzled with variety; but the power of speaking to the soul as Luca spoke was lost.[99]
After the Della Robbias, this is the place to mention Agostino di Gucci or di Duccio,[100] a sculptor who handled terra-cotta somewhat in the manner of Donatello's flat-relief, introducing more richness of detail and aiming at more passion than Luca's taste permitted. For the oratory of S. Bernardino at Perugia he designed the façade partly in stone and partly in baked clay—crowded with figures, flying, singing, playing upon instruments of music, with waving draperies and windy hair and the ecstasy of movement in their delicately modelled limbs. If nothing else remained of Agostino's workmanship, this façade alone would place him in the first rank of contemporary artists. He owed something, perhaps, to his material; for terra-cotta has the charm of improvisation. The hand, obedient to the brain, has made it in one moment what it is, and no slow hours of labour at the stone have dulled the first caprice of the creative fancy. Work, therefore, which, if translated into marble, might have left our sympathy unstirred, affects us with keen pleasure in the mould of plastic clay. What prodigality of thought and invention has been lavished on the terra-cotta models of unknown Italian artists! What forms and faces, beautiful as shapes of dreams, and, like dreams, so airy that we think they will take flight and vanish, lean to greet us from cloisters and palace fronts in Lombardy! To catalogue their multitude would be impossible. It is enough to select one instance out of many; this shall be taken from the chapel of S. Peter Martyr in S. Eustorgio at Milan. High up around the cupola runs a frieze of angels, singing together and dancing with joined hands, while bells composed of fruits and flowers hang down between them. Each angel is an individual shape of joy; the soul in each moves to its own deep melody, but the music made of all is one. Their raiment flutters, the bells chime; the chorus of their gladness falls like voices through a star-lit heaven, half-heard in dreams and everlastingly remembered.
Four sculptors, the younger contemporaries of Luca della Robbia, and marked by certain common qualities, demand attention next. All the work of Antonio Rossellino, Matteo Civitali, Mino da Fiesole, and Benedetto da Majano, is distinguished by sweetness, grace, tranquillity, and self-restraint—as though these artists had voluntarily imposed limits on their genius, refusing to trespass beyond a traced circle of religious subjects, or to aim at effects unrealisable by purity of outline, suavity of expression, delicacy of feeling, and urbanity of style. The charm of manner they possess in common, can scarcely he defined except by similes. The innocence of childhood, the melody of a lute or song-bird as distinguished from the music of an orchestra, the rathe tints of early dawn, cheerful light on shallow streams, the serenity of a simple and untainted nature that has never known the world—many such images occur to the mind while thinking of the sculpture of these men. To charge them with insipidity, immaturity, and monotony, would be to mistake the force of genius and skill displayed by them. We should rather assume that they confined themselves to certain types of tranquil beauty, without caring to realise more obviously striking effects, and that this was their way of meeting the requirements of sculpture considered as a Christian art. The melody of their design, meanwhile, is like the purest song-music of Pergolese or Salvator Rosa, unapproachably perfect in simple outline, and inexhaustibly refreshing.
Though it is possible to characterise the style of these sculptors by some common qualities observable in their work, it should rather be the aim of criticism to point out their differences. Antonio Rossellino, for example, might be distinguished by his leaning toward the manner of Ghiberti, whose landscape backgrounds he has adopted in the circular medallions of his monumental sculpture. A fine perception of the poetic capabilities of Christian art is displayed in Rossellino's idyllic treatment of the Nativity—the adoration of the shepherds, the hush of reverential stillness in the worship Mary pays her infant son.[101] To the qualities of sweetness and tranquillity rare dignity is added in the monument of the young Cardinal di Portogallo.[102] The sublimity of the slumber that is death has never been more nobly and feelingly portrayed than in the supine figure and sleeping features of this most beautiful young man, who lies watched by angels beneath a heavy-curtained canopy. The genii of eternal repose modelled by Greek sculptors are twin-brothers of Love, on whom perpetual slumber has descended amid poppy-fields by Lethe's stream. The turmoil of the world is over for them; they will never wake again; they do not even dream. Sleep is the only power that still has life in them. But the Christian cannot thus conceive the mystery of the soul "fallen on sleep." His art must suggest a time of waiting and a time of waking; and this it does partly through the ministration of attendant angels, who would not be standing there on guard if the clay-cold corpse had no futurity, partly by breathing upon the limbs and visage of the dead a spirit as of life suspended for a while. Thus the soul herself is imaged in the marble "most sweetly slumbering in the gates of dreams."
What Vespasiano tells us of this cardinal, born of the royal house of Portugal, adds the virtue of sincerity to Rossellino's work, proving there is no flattery of the dead man in his sculpture.[103] "Among his other admirable virtues," says the biographer, "Messer Jacopo di Portogallo determined to preserve his virginity, though he was beautiful above all others of his age. Consequently he avoided all things that might prove impediments to his vow, such as free discourse, the society of women, balls, and songs. In this mortal flesh he lived as though he had been free from it—the life, we may say, rather of an angel than a man. And if his biography were written from his childhood to his death, it would be not only an ensample, but confusion to the world. Upon his monument the hand was modelled from his own, and the face is very like him, for he was most lovely in his person, but still more in his soul."
While contemplating this monument of the young cardinal, we feel that the Italians of that age understood sepulchral sculpture far better than their immediate successors. They knew how to carve the very soul, according to the lines which our Webster, a keen observer of all things relating to the grave and death, has put into Jolenta's lips:—
But indeed,
If ever I would have mine drawn to the life,
I would have a painter steal it at such time
I were devoutly kneeling at my prayers;
There is then a heavenly beauty in't; the soul
Moves in the superficies.
The same Webster condemns that evil custom of aping life and movement on the monuments of dead men, which began to obtain when the motives of pure repose had been exhausted. "Why," asks the Duchess of Malfi, "do we grow fantastical in our death-bed? Do we affect fashion in the grave?" "Most ambitiously," answers Bosola; "princes' images on their tombs do not lie as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven; but with their hands under their cheeks (as if they died of the toothache): they are not carved with their eyes fixed upon the stars; but, as their minds were wholly bent upon the world, the self-same way they seem to turn their faces." A more trenchant criticism than this could hardly have been pronounced upon Andrea Contucci di Monte Sansavino's tombs of Ascanio Sforza and Girolamo della Rovere, if Bosola had been standing before them in the church of S. Maria del Popolo when he spoke. Were it the function of monumental sculpture to satirise the dead, or to point out their characteristic faults for the warning of posterity, then the sepulchres of these worldly cardinals of Sixtus IV.'s creation would be artistically justified. But the object of art is not this. The idea of death, as conceived by Christians, has to be portrayed. The repose of the just, the resurrection of the body, and the coming judgment, afford sufficient scope for treatment of good men and bad alike. Or if the sculptor have sublime imagination, he may, like Michael Angelo, suggest the alternations of the day and night, slumber and waking, whereby "our little life is rounded with a sleep."
This digression will hardly be thought superfluous when we reflect how large a part of the sculptor's energy was spent on tombs in Italy. Matteo Civitali of Lucca was at least Rossellino's equal in the sculpturesque delineation of spiritual qualities; but the motives he chose for treatment were more varied. All his work is penetrated with deep, prayerful, intense feeling; as though the artist's soul, poured forth in ecstasy and adoration, had been given to the marble. This is especially true of two angels kneeling upon the altar of the Chapel of the Sacrament in Lucca Cathedral. Civitali, by singular good fortune, was chosen in the best years of his life to adorn the cathedral of his native city; and it is here, rather than at Genoa, where much of his sculpture may also be seen, that he deserves to be studied. For the people of Lucca he designed the Chapel of the Santo Volto—a gem of the purest Renaissance architecture—and a pulpit in the same style. His most remarkable sculpture is to be found in three monuments: the tombs of Domenico Bertini and Pietro da Noceto, and the altar of S. Regulus. The last might be chosen as an epitome of all that is most characteristic in Tuscan sculpture of the earlier Renaissance. It is built against the wall, and architecturally designed so as to comprehend a full-length figure of the bishop stretched upon his bier and watched by angels, a group of Madonna and her child seated above him, a row of standing saints below, and a predella composed of four delicately finished bas-reliefs. Every part of this complex work is conceived with spirit and executed with care; and the various elements are so combined as to make one composition, the body of the saint on his sarcophagus forming the central object of the whole.
To do more than briefly mention the minor sculptors of this group would be impossible. Mino di Giovanni, called Da Fiesole, was characterised by grace that tended to degenerate into formality. The tombs in the Abbey of Florence have an almost infantine sweetness of style, which might be extremely piquant, were it not that Mino pushed this quality in other works to the verge of mannerism.[104] Their architectural features are the same as those of similar monuments in Tuscany:—a shallow recess, flanked by Renaissance pilasters, and roofed with a semicircular arch; within the recess, the full-length figure of the dead man on a marble coffin of antique design; in the lunette above, a Madonna carved in low relief.[105] Mino's bust of Bishop Salutati in the cathedral church of Fiesole is a powerful portrait, no less distinguished for vigorous individuality than consummate workmanship. The waxlike finish of the finely chiselled marble alone betrays that delicacy which with Mino verged on insipidity. The same faculty of character delineation is seen in three profiles, now in the Bargello Museum, attributed to Mino. They represent Frederick Duke of Urbino, Battista Sforza, and Galeazzo Sforza. The relief is very low, rising at no point more than half an inch above the surface of the ground, but so carefully modulated as to present a wonderful variety of light and shade, and to render the facial expression with great vividness.
Desiderio da Settignano, one of Donatello's few scholars, was endowed with the same gift of exquisite taste as his friend Mino da Fiesole;[106] but his inventive faculty was bolder, and his genius more robust, in spite of the profuse ornamentation and elaborate finish of his masterpiece, the tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce. The bust he made of Marietta di Palla degli Strozzi enables us to compare his style in portraiture with that of Mino.[107] It would be hard to find elsewhere a more captivating combination of womanly sweetness and dignity. We feel, in looking at these products of the best age of Italian sculpture, that the artists who conceived them were, in the truest sense of the word, gentle. None but men courteous and unaffected could have carved a face like that of Marietta Strozzi, breathing the very spirit of urbanity. To express the most amiable qualities of a living person in a work of art that should suggest emotional tranquillity by harmonious treatment, and indicate the temperance of a disciplined nature by self-restraint and moderation of style, and to do this with the highest technical perfection, was the triumph of fifteenth-century sculpture.
An artist who claims a third place beside Mino and his friend, "il bravo Desider si dolce e bello,"[108] is Benedetto da Majano. In Benedetto's bas-reliefs at San Gemignano, carved for the altars of those unlovely Tuscan worthies, S. Fina and S. Bartolo, we find a pictorial treatment of legendary subjects, proving that he had studied Ghirlandajo's frescoes. The same is true about his pulpit in S. Croce at Florence, his treatment of the story of S. Savino at Faenza, and his "Annunciation" in the church of Monte Oliveto at Naples. Benedetto, indeed, may be said to illustrate the working of Ghiberti's influence by his liberal use of landscape and architectural backgrounds; but the style is rather Ghirlandajo's than Ghiberti's. If it was a mistake in the sculptors of that period to subordinate their art to painting, the error, we feel, was aggravated by the imitation of a manner so prosaic as that of Ghirlandajo. That Benedetto began life as a tarsiatore may perhaps help to account for his pictorial style in bas-relief.[109] In estimating his total claim as an artist, we must not forget that he designed the formidable and splendid Strozzi Palace.
It will be observed that all the sculptors hitherto mentioned have been Tuscans; and this is due to no mere accident—nor yet to caprice on the part of their historian. Though the other districts of Italy produced admirable workmen, the direction given to this art proceeded from Tuscany. Florence, the metropolis of modern culture, determined the course of the æsthetical Renaissance. Even at Rimini we cannot account for the carvings in low relief, so fanciful, so delicately wrought, and so profusely scattered over the side chapels of S. Francesco, without the intervention of two Florentines, Bernardo Ciuffagni and Donatello's pupil Simone; while in the palace of Urbino we trace some hand not unlike that of Mino da Fiesole at work upon the mouldings of door and architrave, cornice and high-built chimney.[110] Not only do we thus find Tuscan craftsmen or their scholars employed on all the great public buildings throughout Italy; but it also happens that, except in Tuscany, the decoration of churches and palaces is not unfrequently anonymous.
This does not, however, interfere with the truth that sculpture, like all the arts, assumed a somewhat different character in each Italian city. The Venetian stone-carvers leaned from the first to a richer and more passionate style than the Florentine, reproducing the types of Cima's and Bellini's paintings.[111] Whole families, like the Bregni—classes, like the Lombardi—schools, like that of Alessandro Leopardi, worked together on the monumental sculpture of S. Zanipolo. In the tombs of the Doges the old Pisan motive of the curtains (first used by Arnolfo di Cambio at Orvieto, and afterwards with grand effect by Giovanni Pisano at Perugia) is expanded into a sumptuous tent-canopy. Pages and genii and mailed heroes take the place of angels, and the marine details of Roman reliefs are copied in the subordinate decoration. At Verona the mediæval tombs of the Scaligers, with their vast chest-like sarcophagi and mounted warriors, exhibit features markedly different from the monuments of Tuscany; while the mixture of fresco with sculpture, in monuments like that of the Cavalli in S. Anastasia, and in many altar-pieces, is at variance with Florentine usage. On the terra-cotta mouldings, so frequent in Lombard cities, I have already had occasion to touch briefly. They almost invariably display a feeling for beauty more sensuous, with less of scientific purpose in their naturalism, than is common in the Tuscan style. Guido Mazzoni of Modena, called Il Modanino, may be mentioned as the sculptor who freed terra-cotta from its dependence upon architecture, and who modelled groups of overpowering dramatic realism. His "Pietà," in the Church of Monte Oliveto at Naples, is valuable, less for its passionate intensity of expression than for the portraits of Pontano, Sannazzaro, and Alfonso of Aragon.[112] This sub-species of sculpture was freely employed in North Italy to stimulate devotion, and to impress the people with lively pictures of the Passion. The Sacro Monte at Varallo, for example, is covered with a multitude of chapels, each one of which presents some chapter of Bible history dramatically rendered by life-size groups of terra-cotta figures. Some of these were designed by eminent painters, and executed by clever modellers in clay. Even now they are scarcely less stirring to the mind of a devout spectator than the scenes of a mediæval Mystery may have been.
The Certosa of Pavia, lastly, is the centre of a school of sculpture that has little in common with the Florentine tradition. Antonio Amadeo[113] and Andrea Fusina, acting in concert with Ambrogio Borgognone the painter, gave it in the fifteenth century that character of rich and complex decorative beauty which many generations of artists were destined to continue and complete. Among the countless sculptors employed upon its marvellous façade Amadeo asserts an individuality above the rest, which is further manifested in his work in the Cappella Colleoni at Bergamo. We there learn to know him, not only as an enthusiastic cultivator of the mingled Christian and pagan manner of the quattrocento, but as an artist in the truest sense of the word sympathetic. The sepulchral portrait of Medea, daughter of the great Condottiere, has a grace almost beyond that of Della Quercia's "Ilaria."[114] Much, no doubt, is due to the peculiarly fragile beauty of the girl herself, who lies asleep with little crisp curls clustering upon her forehead, and with a string of pearls around her slender throat. But the sensibility to loveliness so delicate, and the power to render it in marble with so ethereal a touch upon the rigid stone, belong to the sculptor, and win for him our worship.
The list of fifteenth-century sculptors is almost ended; and already, on the threshold of the sixteenth, stands the mighty form of Michael Angelo. Andrea Contucci da Sansavino and his pupil Jacopo Tatti, called also Sansovino, after his master, must, however, next be mentioned as continuing the Florentine tradition without subservience to the style of Buonarroti. Andrea da Sansavino was a sculptor in whom for the first time the faults of the mid-Renaissance period are glaringly apparent. He persistently sacrificed simplicity of composition to decorative ostentation, and tranquillity of feeling to theatrical effect. The truth of this will be acknowledged by all who have studied the tombs of the cardinals in S. Maria del Popolo already mentioned,[115] and the bas-reliefs upon the Santa Casa at Loreto. In technical workmanship Andrea proved himself an able craftsman, modelling marble with the plasticity of wax, and lavishing patterns of the most refined invention. Yet the decorative prodigality of this master corresponded to the frigid and stylistic graces of the neo-Latin poets. It was so much mannerism—adopted without real passion from the antique, and applied with a rhetorical intention. Those acanthus scrolls and honeysuckle borders, in spite of their consummate finish, fail to arrest attention, leaving the soul as unstirred as the Ovidian cadences of Bembo.
Jacopo Tatti was a genius of more distinction. Together with San Gallo and Bramante he studied the science of architecture in Rome, where he also worked at the restoration of newly discovered antiques, and cast in bronze a copy of the "Laocoon." Thus equipped with the artistic learning of his age, he was called in 1523 by the Doge, Andrea Gritti, to Venice. The material pomp of Venice at this epoch, and the pride of her unrivalled luxury, affected his imagination so powerfully that his genius, tutored by Florentine and Umbrian masters among the ruins of old Rome, became at once Venetian. In the history of the Renaissance the names of Titian and Aretino, themselves acclimatised aliens, are inseparably connected with that of their friend Sansovino. At Venice he lived until his death in 1570, building the Zecca, the Library, the Scala d'Oro in the Ducal Palace, and the Loggietta beneath the bell-tower of S. Mark. In all his work he subordinated sculpture to architecture, and his statuary is conceived in the bravura, manner of Renaissance paganism. Whatever may be the faults of Sansovino in both arts, it cannot be denied that he expressed, in a style peculiar to himself, the large voluptuous external life of Venice at a moment when this city was the Paris or the Corinth of Renaissance Europe. At the same time, the shallowness of Sansovino's inspiration as a sculptor is patent in his masterpieces of parade—the "Neptune" and the "Mars," guarding the Scala d'Oro. Separated from the architecture of the court and staircase, they are insignificant in spite of their colossal scale. In their place they add a haughty grandeur, by the contrast which their flowing forms and arrogant attitudes present to the severer lines of the construction. But they are devoid of artistic sincerity, and occupy the same relation to true sculpture as flourishes of rhetoric, however brilliant, to poetry embodying deep thought or passion. At first sight they impose: on further acquaintance we find them chiefly interesting as illustrations of a potent civic life upon the wane, gorgeous in its decay.
Sansovino was a first-rate craftsman. The most finished specimen of his skill is the bronze door of the Sacristy of S. Marco, upon which he is said to have worked through twenty years. Portraits of the sculptor, Titian, and Pietro Aretino are introduced into the decorative border. These heads start from the surface of the gate with astonishing vivacity. That Aretino should thus daily assist in effigy at the procession of priests bearing the sacred emblems from the sacristy to the high altar of S. Mark, is one of the most characteristic proofs of sixteenth-century indifference to things holy and things profane.
Jacopo Sansovino marks the final intrusion of paganism into modern art. The classical revival had worked but partially and indirectly upon Ghiberti and Donatello—not because they did not feel it most intensely, but because they clung to nature far more closely than to antique precedent. This enthusiasm inspired Sansovino with the best and strongest qualities that he can boast; and if his genius had been powerful enough to resist the fascination of merely rhetorical effects, he might have produced a perfect restoration of the classic style. His was no lifeless or pedantic imitation of antique fragments, but a real expression of the fervour with which the modern world hailed the discoveries revealed to it by scholarship. This is said advisedly. The most beautiful and spirited pagan statue of the Renaissance period, justifying the estimate here made of Sansovino's genius, is the "Bacchus" exhibited in the Bargello Museum. Both the Bacchus and the Satyriscus at his side are triumphs of realism, irradiated and idealised by the sculptor's vivid sense of natural gladness. Considered as a restitution of the antique manner, this statue is decidedly superior to the "Bacchus" of Michael Angelo. While the mundane splendour of Venice gave body and fulness to Sansovino's paganism, he missed the self-restraint and purity of taste peculiar to the studious shades of Florence. In his style, both architectural and sculptural, the neo-pagan sensuality of Italy expanded all its bloom.
For the artist at this period a Greek myth and a Christian legend were all one. Both afforded the occasion for displaying technical skill in fluent forms, devoid of any but voluptuous feeling; while both might be subordinated to rich effects of decoration.[116] To this point the intellectual culture of the fifteenth century had brought the plastic arts of Italy, by a process similar to that which ended in the "Partus Virginis" of Sannazzaro. They were still indisputably vigorous, and working in accordance with the movement of the modern spirit. Yet the synthesis they attempted to effect between heathenism and Christianity, by a sheer effort of style, and by indifferentism, strikes us from the point of view of art alone, not reckoning religion or morality, as unsuccessful. Still, if it be childish on the one hand to deplore that the Christian earnestness of the earlier masters had failed, it would be even more ridiculous to complain that paganism had not been more entirely recovered. The double-mind of the Renaissance, the source of its weakness in art as in thought, could not be avoided, because humanity at this moment had to lose the mediæval sincerity of faith, and to assimilate the spirit of a bygone civilisation. This, for better or for worse, was the phase through which the intellect of modern Europe was obliged to pass; and those who have confidence in the destinies of the human race, will not spend their strength in moaning over such shortcomings as the periods of transition bring inevitably with them. The student of Italian history may indeed more reasonably be allowed to question whether the arts, if left to follow their own development unchecked, might not have recovered from the confusion of the Renaissance and have entered on a stage of nobler activity through earnest and unaffected study of nature. But the enslavement of the country, together with the counter-Reformation, suspended the Renaissance in mid-career; and what remains of Italian art is incomplete. Besides, it must be borne in mind that the confusion of opinions consequent upon the clash of the modern with the ancient world, left no body of generally accepted beliefs to express; nor has the time even yet arrived for a settlement and synthesis that shall be favourable to the activity of the figurative arts.
Sansovino himself was neither original nor powerful enough, to elevate the mixed motives of Renaissance sculpture by any lofty idealisation. To do that remained for Michael Angelo. The greatness of Michael Angelo consists in this—that while literature was sinking into the frivolity of Academies and the filth of the Bernesque "Capitoli," while the barefaced villanies of Aretino won him credit, while sensual magnificence formed the ideal of artists who were neither Greeks nor Christians, while Ariosto found no subject fitter for his genius than a glittering romance, he and he alone maintained the Dantesque dignity of the Italian intellect in his sculpture. Michael Angelo stands so far apart from other men, and is so gigantic a force for good and evil in the history of art, that to estimate his life and labour in relation to the Renaissance must form the subject of a separate chapter. For the present it is enough to observe that his immediate scholars, Raffaello da Montelupo, and Gian Angelo Montorsoli, caught little from their master but the mannerism of contorted form and agitated action. This mannerism, a blemish even in the strong work of Buonarroti, became ridiculous when adopted by men of feeble powers and passionless imagination. By straining the art of sculpture to its utmost limits, Michael Angelo expressed vehement emotions in marble; and the forced attitudes affected in his work had their value as significant of spiritual struggle. His imitators showed none of their master's sublime force, none of that terribilità which made him unapproachable in social intercourse and inimitable in art. They merely fancied that dignity and beauty were to be achieved by placing figures in difficult postures, exaggerated muscular anatomy, and twisting the limbs of their models upon sections of ellipses in uncomfortable attitudes, till the whole of their work was writhen into uncouth lines. Buonarroti himself was not responsible for these results. He wrought out his own ideal with the firmness of a genius that obeys the law of its own nature, doing always what it must. That the decadence of sculpture into truculent bravado was independent of his direct influence, is further proved by the inefficiency of his contemporaries.