figures, and still more the unity of the grouping, show
how far he had already left his predecessors behind. His
work, of which the pulpit at Pisa is the most famous
example and exercised the strongest influence, was hailed
with enthusiasm by his contemporaries, who, with Tuscan
quickness of apprehension, felt at once the superiority of
the new and more living style. Niccola founded a school
which maintained his traditions and spread them through
Italy, preparing the way for the great sculptors of the
fifteenth century. In the work of his son Giovanni
Giovanni ^ •'
Pisano, c. there is less of the coldness and caution that might
have interfered with the success of Niccola's re-
vival, and more of the fire and intensity that belong to
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Gothic art. If Niccola seems timid, because he is newly
learning restraint from the antique, Giovanni unites dignity
with wealth of fancy and force of temper, and so made a
stronger impression on his contemporaries.
We must leave this early school of sculptors with a
brief mention of its two most important exponents — Andrea
Andrea Pisano, who, under Giotto's direction, made
c!^i278- statues for S. Maria del Fiore, and whose carv-
c. 1849 ing in the first gate of the Baptistery, with all
its new simplicity, shows already the delicate and pictorial
character that was to dominate Renaissance sculpture —
Orcagna, ^^^ Orcagna, who, beginning life as a goldsmith,
d. 1869 achieved a triumph of architeptural sculpture in
his tabernacle of Orsammichele (a beautiful shrine, covered
with bas-reliefs in white marble, intaglios, mosaics, and
enamels, built to enclose a famous picture of the Virgin),
and we must pass on to the year 1400, the most memor-
able date in the story of Renaissance sculpture. This
was the year in which the Signory of Florence issued a
public invitation to the sculptors of Italy to complete
the great bronze gates of the Baptistery, of which Andrea
had carved the first. The event is memorable, because,
among the seven who were chosen to prepare a trial
subject in bronze, were three of the four greatest sculptors
of the century — Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and Delia Quercia
— while it is said that the young Donatello, who completes
the great quartet, was consulted by the judges as to the
Delia merits of the proofs. That of Delia Quercia was
Quercia, one of the first to be thrown out, although,
judging by the strength and simplicity of his
extant work, he was more faithful to the true principles
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of sculpture than either of his rivals. Brunelleschi's
design sufiered from a lack of harmony and repose, while
Ghiberti, Ghiberti's, if it had any defect, had that of its
1878-1466 quality, an over-refinement and smoothness of
execution. Brunelleschi chivalrously retired from the
contest, and both the second and the third gates were
completed by Ghiberti. In these gates, which are so
beautiful that Michael Angelo said they might well be
called the Gates of Paradise, the marvellous delicacy
and beauty of Ghiberti's art are fully displayed. He
had been trained as a goldsmith, and had also practised
painting, and in his carving he seems to have retained
something of the spirit of both these arts. Although he
had the most loving and reverent appreciation of classic
work, he abandoned the old principle that perspective has
no place in sculpture, and set his figures in backgrounds
of architecture and landscape, which almost give his
reliefs the appearance of paintings in bronze. In the hands
of followers who lacked the master's genius, this was a
practice that led to very inartistic results. The confusion
that existed in the popular mind at that time between
the sculptor and the architect is well shown by the
insistence of the Florentines that, because Ghiberti carved
so exquisitely, he should assist Brunelleschi in the construc-
tion of the great dome of S. Maria, an architectural feat
which Ghiberti was wholly unqualified even to attempt,
and which the other was perfectly capable of completing
alone.
Donatello was a sculptor of a more heroic temper than
Ghiberti, sharing the daring spirit and the strong indi-
viduality of his friend Brunelleschi. With the latter he
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travelled to Rome, and the two gave themselves up with
ardent devotion to the study of ancient monuments. The
Donateiio, irresistible fascination which antiquity exercised
1386-1466 £j^ |.jjg fifteenth century over the artists, as well
as the scholars, is well illustrated by a little incident which
occurred after their return from Rome, when Brunelleschi
happening one day to hear Donateiio talking to other
young sculptors, on the Piazza of S. Maria del Fiore,
about a beautiful piece of ancient sculpture which he had
seen at Cortona, set oflF, as he was, without a word to any-
one, and walked there and back to do homage to the
recovered treasure. Both these men were no less enthu-
siastic seekers after truth, eagerly studying the living
human form, and even — a far more difficult task in those
days than now — learning the secrets of its construction by
dissecting it after death, even though they were driven
to obtain subjects by rifling the gibbet or the grave.
The force of this reaction naturally led to the error of a
too close adherence to the model. The story is well known
of Donatello's youthful pride in a crucifix he had carved
with extreme care, following every muscle of the Tuscan
lad who posed for him, and how this pride was dashed when
Brunelleschi disparagingly, but truly, told him that he
had represented no Christ, but a crucified peasant. It
led, too, to the severe and painful realism, out of place
in sculpture, which appears in Donatello's Magdalen and
Baptist, and in much of PoUajuolo's work. The bronze
David and the marble St, George are the noblest examples
from Donatello's chisel, and show the beauty and grace
which this great sculptor had learnt from the ancients,
sublimed by a spiritual force to which they never
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attained. As a master of relief, noble in its simplicity
while showing the highest skill in its gradation, Donatello
exercised a great influence on Benaissance ornament.
Andrea Verocchio, who is best known to us by his
influence over Lionardo da Vinci, and by the magnifi-
Verocchio, ^ent equestrian statue of Bartolommeo CoUeoni
148&-1488 ^iiich ^as mainly his work, was a pupil of
Donatello, and shared the energy and realism of his
master, if he lacked his genius. It needed all their vigour
to counteract the tendency of early Renaissance sculp-
ture to over-refinement. The early Tuscan sculptors
loved to carve in very low relief, worked in fine grada-
tions that can scarcely be appreciated except by the
touch. This delicacy appears at its noblest in the work
, „ of Luca della Robbia. Nothing can rival for
Lncadella V
Robbia, pure swcetness and for buoyant innocent grace,
weakened by no touch of effeminacy, those
lovely groups of singing and dancing children which he
carved in marble for the organ gallery of S. Maria del
Fiore. Wearying of transferring his delicate spiritual
conceptions to the hard marble, Luca set himself to dis-
cover a glaze that would preserve clay, and so invented
the kind of terra-cotta work with which his name is
associated. As he rarely used any colours but white and
pale blue, his work retained a simplicity and purity of
character which was lost when his relatives, who carried
on his method, added vivid colours to the clay. The same
delicacy, refined to a more dangerous sweetness, appears in
the work of Mino da Fiesole — dangerous, because with
all its purity and true religious inspiration it has a
tendency to degenerate into insipidity. There is nothing
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insipid or monotonous, however, about the bust of
Bishop Salutati carved by Mino for his tomb
Fiesoie, at Fiesole, in which all this sculptor's peculiar
freshness and delicacy are shown united to a
wonderfully vivid delineation of character.
Much of the sculpture of the Renaissance is associated
with tombs. We may instance the tomb of Benedict XI.,
g , by Giovanni Pisano, at Perugia, where the Pope
monu- lies in peaceful sleep while guardian spirits
hold back the curtains that canopy his bed (a
treatment that was initiated by Arnolfo di Cambio, and
was to become extremely popular) ; the gloomy sepulchre
of Sixtus IV. cast in bronze by Pollajuolo, with its
strange sombre figures ; the far sublimer monument of
the young Cardinal di Portogallo, wherein Rossellino has
represented the young man — the beauty of his vigorous
manhood frozen into stillness — watched by angels who
stand ready to conduct him to heaven; the exquisite
sleeping figure of fair young Medea CoUeoni, daughter of
the famous general, which Antonio Amadeo carved at
Bergamo ; and the still more beautiful lady Ilaria, who
lies, sculptured by Delia Quercia, in Lucca Cathedral, a
rare instance of ideal feminine loveliness in early sculp-
ture. It was in these sleeping figures of the dead that
early Renaissance sculpture reached its highest develop-
ment. The revived classic architecture had little need of
the sculptor's work, and the demand had not yet risen
again for ideal statuary, such as the Greeks had pro-
duced ; but here, in the commemorative portraiture of the
dead, it could find full scope. The splendour-loving
Venetians heaped their great sepulchral monuments
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with worldly symbols, and surrounded them with pages,
genii, and mailed knights, while the sleeping figure which
should have been dominant is often carelessly and feebly
carved. The French, who to the mediaeval habit of dwelling
on Death added the Eenaissance horror of it as that which
snatched them from the joyous world they loved, treated
their tombs in a morbid, semi-ironical way. For them
there was no medium between the fulness of vigorous life
and the ghastliness of the lifeless body ; and so they often
placed the two side by side, the living man in all the
pride of life and the wealth of sumptuous clothing, and
by his side the rigid shrouded corpse. But the Tuscan
sculptors of the fifteenth century felt the full dignity of
the Christian conception of Death, and they represent the
sleeping body in an attitude of tranquil expectation.
Their portraits are indeed realistic, and yet, even when
the subject is commonplace, it is ennobled by the majesty of
Death, and beautified by the extreme delicacy and loving
minuteness of the handiwork.
By the close of the century the simplicity of the
earlier masters who united classical tradition to Christian
Decline of Sentiment was giving place to the Neo-paganism
sculpture ^f ^j^^ sixteenth century. The researches of
such unwearied collectors as the Medici had brought to
light a great number of Greek as well as Roman sculptures.
Just as Bembo sacrificed originality and depth to a formal
imitation of ancient Rhetoric, so the sculptors, inspired by
no higher ideal than the close imitation of Greek art, began
to fill Italy with statues that * have nothing Greek about
them but their names, their nakedness, and their associa-
tion with myths the significance whereof was never really
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felt by the sculptors.' Greek sculpture had a soul, if it
was not a very complex one. The beauty of youth and
the strength of manhood had for the Greeks an almost
spiritual significance ; their statuary was closely connected
with their religious worship. But when, in the general up-
heaval of moral ideas and loosening of old restraints, sculp-
tors gave themselves up to the reproduction of beautiful or
colossal human forms, having no spiritual or intellectual
significance whatever, their work became frankly animal and
sensual, and so debased. In fact it was not possible for men
like Bandinelli to be as the Greeks were, and as they fondly
imagined themselves to be, ' naked and not ashamed ' ;
they could only be naked and shameless.
Sanzovino, Cellini, and Gian Bologna belong to this
class ; but their work is inspired by a higher genius, and
Sanzovino, approaches almost as near to the true Pagan
1477-1576 i^eal as Politian's songs. Sanzovino's work
has the true Venetian spirit. That is to say, like the
paintings of Paolo Veronese, it is highly decorative, volup-
tuous, non-religious, and fully conscious of its own beauty.
Gian Bologna, a sculptor who had great influence
Bologna, upon his generation both in England and in
Germany, is best known by one exquisite
production, the world-famed bronze Mrnxury, Benve-
, nuto Cellini is in more ways than one typical of
Benvenuto . . •' •'^
Cellini, the Eeuaissance. In his comprehensive genius,
his readiness to turn his hand to almost any bit
of delicate workmanship, he illustrates its versatility. In
his extraordinary character — a dissipated ruflSan and a
most devout Catholic — he illustrates the entire separation
in Italy at this time between religion and morality —
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illustrates it the more significantly because among his
contemporaries his really atrocious crimes seem to have
aroused so little horror, and to have been accepted as the
eccentricities of genius. Cellini was inspired by a sublime
confidence in his own mental, moral, and artistic greatness,
and firmly believed that the hand of God specially pro-
tected him in his career of rascaldom. He alternated the
foulest murders with heavenly visions and ecstatic reveries,
and he was convinced that, after his imprisonment in the
castle of St. Angelo, where, for lack of other occupation, he
read the Bible and prayed many prayers, a visible aureole
surrounded his saintly brow. Francis I. was fascinated
by his Italian devilry and his wonderful skill, and would
have liked to keep him in Paris, but his spirit was too
restless to stay long in any place. For Francis he made
the famous great silver candelabra. Most of his work in
France was for Fontainebleau, which, as we have seen, had
become, under royal patronage, a veritable school of Italian
art. Here was placed his colossal group of the Nymph, stag
and hounds. But it was as a goldsmith rather than as a
sculptor that he influenced French art, teaching elegance,
grace, and the use of mythological subjects to the already
skilful native school of goldworkers. Cellini's most
famous work is his bronze Perseus, in which, in spite of its
defects, there is crystallised all that was best and most
spirited in the over-ripe art it represents. For Benais-
sance sculpture had already culminated in Michael Angelo?
with the close of whose long life its story comes to an
end.
Michael Angelo, though almost equally famous as
architect and painter, was, by nature and by choice, a
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sculptor — the one great sculptor the modem world has pro*
duced. He has btit few of the characteristics we hav.e
„. , , considered as belonffinff to the Renaissance : he
Michael .
Angeio, has not its hopefulness, its brilliant versatility,
its insatiable interest in all the business and plea-
sure of the world. He stands alone, a rugged, solitary
figure, towering over the scene like some great mountain
which depends upon no charm of woodland, of green
meadow, of music of brook or bird, but which awes by its
majestic height, and fascinates by the simplicity of its grand
outlines. We have not to measure Michael Angeio by his
achievements, those Titanic fragments which but dimly
reveal the master. Working as the servant of first one
and then another greedy, inconsiderate patron, his life is
one long story of thwarted endeavours, of disappointments,
of intolerable" humiliations, which turned his strength to
bitterness, and made him hide the deep store of sweetness
which is the secret of his power under a harsh, austere
manner. The pupil of Ghirlandajo, he became, while a
mere lad, the prot6g6 of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and
studied among his collection of antiques in the garden of
St. Mark's. For a time he felt the full influence of the
classic style, and caught from it some of the breadth and
majesty that went to make up his * terrible manner.' But
the bent of his mind was not towards Paganism. In
revulsion from the moral degeneration of the society in
which he lived, he turned to the mediaeval piety, the
uncompromising rectitude which he found in Dante, and in
Dante's great successor, Savonarola. Besides the Bacchus^
and the two Gupids, and a few other works of his early
manhood, in most of which the Pagan ideal is strongly
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modified by his own individuality, he produced yery few
classic statues. Of his early works it is the Pietd^ the
dead Christ in His mother's arms, carved when he was
twenty-four, which in its power, its dignity, and its pathos
gives the keynote of his style. Three great works occupied
the middle and best portion of his life — the years between
1505 and 1534. These were the mausoleum of Julius II.,
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and the Sacristy of
S. Lorenzo at Florence. Of these it was only the paint-
ing, the one which was least congenial to him, at which
he was allowed to work fairly uninterruptedly, and he
completed it in an incredibly short time. The others
were never finished. His work on the mausoleum dragged
The mau- ^^ through many weary years, and embittered
Boieum i}^Q sculptor's life. He was set to work upon it
by Julius II., the same wilful, domineering master who
soon after dragged him off to paint the Sistine, whether he
would or no. The ambitious Pontifi* wished for a tomb
that, for size and magnificence, should be the wonder of the
world, and the task accorded well with the daring genius
of the artist. The tomb, as Julius conceived it and
Michael Angelo designed it, would have been too large to
be contained in the old Church of St. Peter, and it was to
enshrine it that the new Cathedral was undertaken.
Michael Angelo went, full of interest, to Carrara to collect
and choose the marbles, but after eight months spent in
this toilsome work he returned to Eome to find that his
capricious patron had already changed his mind and had
temporarily abandoned the idea. This is not the place to
tell the long story of the ' Tragedy of the Sepulchre,' of
the vacillations of the Pope, and the imperious demands of
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his successors, less ambitious for their predecessor's glory
than their own ; suffice it to say that, after the sculptor
had been, as he complained, ' bound hand and foot to this
tomb ' for forty years, he had completed but two fragments
of the colossal scheme, the * mountain of marble covered with
figures wrought in marble and bronze,' the two being the
Moses and the Captives, The former is acknowledged to be
the finest piece of thoughtful sculpture in the world ; the
latter, which were never finished because they were too large
for the gradually diminished size of the tomb, reflect, in
their hopeless struggle against inevitable fate, the mood of
their creator. When Julius died, his successor, Leo X., with
a brutal disregard for the artist and for art, which is almost
incredible in a man of his pretensions to culture, called
Michael Angelo ofi" the tomb, and sent him to the marble
quarries to obtain material for the fa9ade of S, Lorenzo at
Florence, and here nearly five fruitless years were wasted
in preparation for a work which he was never able to com-
plete. In 1521, Leo's brother Giulio de' Medici, afterwards
Clement VIL, set him to work to build the Sacristy of S.
rpj^g Lorenzo, for the reception of Medicean monuments.
Sacristy fhis was no Congenial task for a man who loved
his city with a personal devotion not to be appreciated by
modems — to glorify the memory of the men whom he recog-
nised as her enslavers. But he had no option ; and, indeed,
the monument which he raised in those twelve sad years,
while Rome was sacked and Florence besieged (he himself
superintending the construction of the fortifications, and
labouring night and day in the defence of his city), was
rather a monument to the lost greatness of Florence than to
the proud Medici. True, he carved the two young dukes, the
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one spirited and graceful, the other brooding, oppressed by
a weight of thought ; but it is in the four recumbent figures
beneath them that our interest centres, the figures which
we call Night and Day, Twilight and Dawn, Here we can
trace the conflict between the artist and the patriot ; here
we can see the sorrow, the bitterness, the shame, that were
now the portion of the Beautiful City and of those who
loved her. At the death of Clement, the last for the time
of the great Medici, the sculptor flung down his tools and
left Florence, never to return. Only two of the figures in
the Chapel were finished, the rest shared the incomplete-
ness of so much of Michael Angelo's work. This is a cir-
cumstance which is not altogether regretted by critics, and
perhaps was not regretted by the sculptor himself, who
always loved the fancy that it was a living spirit that he
was disencumbering of its rocky veil. * This incomplete-
ness,' it has been said, * is Michael Angelo's equivalent for
colour in sculpture, it is his way of etherealising pure form,
of relieving its hard realism, arid communicating to it
breath, pulsation, and the effect of life.' At the same
time the Pietd., the Moses, and the Nighty all show that,
given leisure and opportunity, no one was more willing
than he to give the highest finish to the marble. Michael
Angelo was almost sixty now, but he had still thirty more
years of life, in which he painted his tremendous Last
Judgment^ behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel, and in
which he crowned St. Peter's with the miracle of its dome ;
and then, at last, hq-j^sted in an old age that was blessed
with tranquillity, with world-wide honour that brought
none of the old unreasonable demands, and with the sweet
friendship of Vittoria Colonna. With him faded the glory
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of Italian sculpture. Art had become as degenerate and
emasculated as the society which produced it. No one
was left to maintain the great traditions of the fifteenth-
century sculptors. Michael Angelo's own pupils and
followers could only attempt to catch the terrible manner
of the master by imitating and exaggerating the contorted
attitudes and strained muscles in which his vehement
emotions had found expression ; but their feebleness could
not be hidden by these devices, and so the influence of this
great master proved no more beneficial to sculpture than
it was to architecture.
Sculpture in France was influenced by the Italian
Renaissance through the artists whom Francis gathered
Sculpture ^^ Fontainebleau ; but though, while impelled
in France j^y ^j^^ j^^^ enthusiasm for art, it produced in
the sixteenth century a certain amount of work which is
worth attention as illustrative of the time, it did not again
reach the spirited native excellence of thirteenth-century
carving. The first notable sculptor of the Renaissance
was Michel Columbe, who worked in the*
Michel ' T . 1
Columbe, Cathedral of Tours, and erected m that town
the Fontaine de Beaume, which, in its subtle
simplicity and its symmetrical beauty, well deserves to be
called a * genuine blossom of the Renaissance.' As in
Italy, it was for sepulchral monuments that sculpture was
most in demand. Of tombs that belong to the first half
of the century we may mention that of Franpois, Duke of
Brittany, by Columbe ; and that of the children of Anne of
Brittany, and the mausoleum of Louis XII. and Anne, by
Jean Juste, whose work shows traces of his Italian
origin. These early sculptures have the extreme delicacy
P
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of touch that belongs to all French art of the time. The
bas-reliefs are very low and fine, a mere ripple on the
marble.
Goujon is the greatest French sculptor of the Renais-
sance; but even he never rose above the rank of the
Goujon, Mattre Magon, working under the orders of the
1580 ?-i672 architect ; nor did he emancipate his art from its
purely decorative and subordinate position. At Ecouen,