The art of the Italian renaissance; a handbook for students and travellers

Prefatory Note

In this interesting treatise a German writer has made an attempt, and a curiously successful one, to deal with the great period of the High Renaissance in Italy from a somewhat novel point of view — that, in fact, of the craftsman himself, rather than that of the interpreter. Passing over the anecdotic and historical aspects of schools and periods, he has made a synthetic study of that completed form of art which has been described — mistakenly, he contends— as a return to classic ideals brought about by the discovery of antique models. He has confined himself for purposes of demonstration to the works of the great masters of Central Italy. The book is of modest dimensions, and its author does not claim to have dealt exhaustively with his vast theme, but rather to be one of the pioneers in a field that has been strangely neglected by arthistorians and the newest school of art-critics — the field of pure aesthetics. Insisting strongly on the necessity of systematic work on this fruitful ground, Herr Wolfflin does not wander haphazard among the artistic phenomena of the period. The whole question of colour, for instance, has been left for future consideration. He deals here with problems of form alone. From this point of view he has given us an excellent treatise viii

PREFATORY NOTE on composition, or design, to use that word in its widest sense, dealing chiefly with the character and action of figures, and the pattern made by them. The result is a trustworthy guide to the minds of those painters who belonged to the Schools of Florence and Rome — the schools of pure design, as distinguished from those which placed their chief dependence on colour and chiaroscuro. Speaking broadly, his reasoning is the unconscious reasoning of the painter put into words, so that he conveys to the reader the whys and wherefores of things from the artist's own standpoint. Anyone reading Herr Wolffiin carefully may fairly assume that he is following the workings of Raphael's mind as he built up things like the Disjmta, the School of Athens and the Madonna di San S'lsto.

WALTER ARMSTRONG.

Contents

PACE

Introduction

Classic Art 1

Part I

I. Preliminary Survey 7

TI. Leonardo 25

1. The Last Supper 29

2. The Monna Lisa 35

3. St. Anne with the Virgin and the Infant Christ 40

4. The Battle of Anghiari 42

III. Michelangelo (to 1520) 46

1. Early Works 47

2. The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel 58

3. The Prophets and Sibyls 64

4. The Slaves 67

5. The Tomb of Julius 72

IV. Raphael 78

1. The Marriage of the Virgin and the Entombment 80

2. The Florentine Madonnas 85

3. The Camera della Segnatura 90

The Disputa 92

The School of Athens 96

Parnassus 99

Jurisprudence 102

X

CONTENTS

PAGE

IV. Raphael (continued)

4. The Camera d'Eliodoro 103

The Chastisement of Heliodorus 104

The Deliverance of Peter 106

The Mass of Bolsena 108

5. The Cartoons for Tapestries 111

6. The Roman Portraits 120

7. Roman Altar-pictures 131

V. Fra Bartolommeo 143

VI. Andrea del Sarto 157

1. The Frescoes of the Annunziata 158

2. The Frescoes of the Scalzo 162

3. Madonnas and Saints 169

4. A Portrait of Andrea 177

VII. Michelangelo (after 1520) 185

1. The Chapel of the Medici 185

2. The Last Judgment and the Pauline Chapel 194

3. The Decadence 195

Part II

I. The New Feeling 201

II. The New Beauty 225

III. The New Pictorial Form 247

1. Repose, Space, Mass and Size 248

2. Simplification and Lucidity 251

3. Enrichment 263

4. Unity and Inevitability 275

Conclusion 284

I

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGK

Portrait of Count Castiglione, by Raphael Frontispiece

David, by Donatello 12

David, by Yerrocchio 13

Madonna. Relief by Rossellino 14

Angel bearing Candelabrum, by Luca della Robbia 15

Angel bearing Candelabrum, by Benedetto da Majano 16

Allegory of Spring, by Botticelli 17

Raphael's Madonna di Foligno. From Marc Antonio's

engraving 23^

Study of a Girl's Head, by Leonardo da Vinci 27

The Last Supper, by Ghirlandajo 30

The Last Supper, from an engraving by Marc Antonio 3S

Bust of a Florentine Girl, by Desiderio 35

Portrait of Monna Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci 37

St. Anne with the Virgin and Infant Christ, by Leonardo

da Vinci 41

Abundantia, by Gianpietrino 45-

Pieta, by Michelangelo 47

The Madonna of Bruges, by Michelangelo 48

Madonna and Child, by Benedetto da Majano 49 f

LIST OP ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Madonna with the Book. Relief by Michelangelo 50

Holy Family, by Michelangelo 51

David, by Michelangelo 54

Apollo, by Michelangelo 55 Fragment from the Cartoon of the Bathing Soldiers, by

The Erythraian Sibyl, by Michelangelo 66 Figures of Slaves, by Michelangelo. (From the first group) 68 Figures of Slaves, by Michelangelo. (From the third group) 69

Figure of a Slave, by IVlichelangelo 70

Tomb of the Cardinal of Portugal, by Antonio Rossellino 73

Tomb of a Prelate, by Andrea Sansovino 75 The Virgin with SS. Sebastian and John the Baptist, by

Perugino 79

The Entombment, by Perugino 82

The Entombment, by Raphael 83

The Madonna del Granduca, by Raphael 86

The Madonna della Sedia, by Raphael 87

The Madonna del Cardellino, by Raphael 88

The Madonna della Casa Alba, by Raphael 89

The Deliverance of St. Peter, by Domenichino 107

The Miraculous Draught of Fishes 113

Feed my Lambs " 115

The Death of Ananias 117

Portrait of Francesco dell' Opere, by Perugino 123

Portrait of a Cardinal, by Raphael 125

The Violin-Player, by Sebastiano del Piombo 127

Dorothea (Portrait), by Sebastiano del Piombo 129

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii

PAGE

La Donna Velata, by Raphael 131

Madonna with two kneehng Saints, by Albertinelli 135

The Transfiguration, by Giovanni Bellini 138

Fragment from the Transfiguration, by Raphael 139

The Transfiguration, by L. Carracci 141

Vintage. From the Engraving by Marc Antonio 142 The Virgin appearing to St. Bernard, by Fra Bartolommeo 147

Madonna with Saints, by Fra Bartolommeo 149 The Risen Christ with the Four Evangelists, by Fra

Bartolom m eo 152

Pieta, by Fra Bartolommeo 153

The Holy Trinity, by Albertinelli. 154

The Annunciation, by Albertinelli 155

The Birth of the Virgin, by Andrea del Sarto 159

The Preaching of John the Baptist, by Andrea del Sarto 164

The Preaching of John the Baptist, by Ghirlandajo 165

Salome Dancing before Herod, by Andrea del Sarto 167

Justice, by A. Sansovino 169

The Annunciation, by Andrea del Sarto 170

The Madonna delle Arpie, by Andrea del Sarto 171

Disputa, by Andrea del Sarto 172 The Madonna with six Saints (1524), by Andrea del Sarto 174

The Madonna del Sacco, by Andrea del Sarto 175

St. John the Baptist, by Andrea del Sarto 177

Supposed Portrait of Himself, by Andrea del Sarto ] 79

Portrait of a Youth, by Franciabigio 183

The Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici, with the figures of

Morning and Evening, by Michelangelo 187 xiv

LIST OP ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

The Medici Madonna, by Michelangelo 190

Crouching Boy, by Michelangelo 191

Christ, by Michelangelo 192

An Allegory, by Bronzino 193

Venus and Amor {II Giorno), by Vasari 197

The Adoration of the Shepherds, by P. Tibaldi 198

Baptism of Christ, by Yerrocchio 202

Baptism of Christ, by A. Sansovino 203

Pieta. (From Marc Antonio's engraving after Raphael) 205

The Visitation, by Sebastiano del Piombo 207

Madonna and Child with Angels, by Filippino Lippi 216

The youthful St. John Preaching, by Raphael 224

The Birth of John the Baptist, by Ghirlandajo 226 Tobias with the Angel, by Verrocchio ( ?) (or perhaps

Botticini) 227

Attendant carrying Fruit, by Ghirlandajo 228

Woman carrying Water, by Raphael 229

Venus, by Lorenzo di Credi 230

Venus, by Franciabigio (?) 231

La bella Simonetta, by Piero di Cosimo 232

Vittoria Colonna (so-called), by Michelangelo 233

Allegory, by Filippino Lippi 240

Venus. (Copy from Marc Antonio's engraving) 246 Three Female Saints (fragment), by Sebastiano del Piombo 253

Prudence, by Pollaiuolo 256

Reclining Venus (fragment), by Piero di Cosimo 260

Reclining Venus, by Titian 261

Perseus (cast), by Benvenuto Cellini 264

LIST OP ILLUSTRATIONS

XV

PAGE

Giovannino. in the Berlin Museum 265

St. Cosmo, by Montorsoli 266

St. John the Baptist, by J. Sansovino 267

Madonna with eight Saints, by Andrea del Sarto 268

Madonna with Angels and six Saints, by Botticelli 269

Madonna with the two SS. John, by Botticelli 274

The Death of Peter Martyr, by Gentile Bellini (?) 278

The Death of Peter Martyr, by Titian 279

St. Jerome, by Basaiti 280

St. Jerome, by Titian 281

Holy Family, by Bronzino 285

INTRODUCTION

CLASSIC ARTi

The word " classic" has a somewhat chilly sound. It seems to thrust

us out of the brilliant, living world into an airless space, the abode of

shadows, not of human beings with warm red blood. Classic Art represents

for us eternal death, eternal age, the fruit of the academies, a product of

teaching rather than of life. And our thirst for the living, the actual,

the tangible is so insatiable ! The art the modern man demands is an art

that savours of earth. The Quattrocento, and not the Cinquecento, is the

darling age of our generation ; we love its frank sense of reality, its naivete

of vision and emotion. We readily take a few archaisms of expressions

into the bargain, so pleasant is it to admire and to smile at the same time.

The traveller at Florence pores with unquenchable delight over the pictures

of the old masters, who tell their story so artlessly and sincerely that

he feels himself transported into the cheerful Florentine room where a

woman receives her visitors after child-birth, or into the streets and squares

of the mediaeval city where the people stand about, and whence one or the

other of the actors in the scene looks out of the picture at us with a

vitality positively startling. Everyone knows Ghirlandajo's paintings in

Santa Maria Novella. How gaily the artist sets forth the legends of the

Virgin and of St. John, telling the story in a homely, but not a sordid

fashion, showing life under its holiday aspect, with a healthy delight in

colour and profusion, costly raiment and ornaments, rich architecture and

plenishings. What could be daintier than Filippino's picture in the Badia,

^ It will, of course, be understood that throughout this work, the author uses the term "Classic Art" in a special sense, applying it to the Art of the High Renaissance in Italy.— Tr.

B of the Madonna appearing to St. Bernard., and laying her slender hand on his book ? And what an aroma of Nature breathes from the lovely girl-angels who attend the Virgin, and press forward, timid yet inquisitive, behind her mantle, their hands mechanically folded in the attitude of prayer, as they look wonderingly at the strange man. Before Botticelli's charm even Raphael himself must yield, and he who has once fallen under the spell of his sensuous melancholy will be apt to find a Madonjia della Sedia uninteresting.

The early Renaissance calls up a vision of slender-limbed, virginal figures in variegated robes, blooming meadows, floating veils, spacious halls with wide arches on graceful pillars. It means all the fresh vigour of youth, shining eyes, all that is bright, transparent, lively, cheerful, natural and varied. Pure nature, yet nature with a touch of fairy splendour.

We pass unwillingly and distrustfully from this gay and many-coloured world into the still and stately halls of classic art. What manner of men are these ? Their gestures seem strange to us. We miss the child-like unconscious charm of a more intimate art. Here there is no one who looks at us like an old friend. Here are no cosy rooms with homely utensils scattered about, but colourless walls and massive architecture.

Indeed, the modern Northerner approaches works of art such as the School of Athens so wholly unprepared for their enjoyment, that his embarrassment at a first sight of them is not unnatural. We can hardly blame him, if he secretly asks himself why Raphael did not rather choose to paint a Roman flower- market, or some such animated scene as that of the peasants coming to be shaved on Sunday mornings in the Piazza Montanara. The artistic problems solved in those other works have no points of contact with modern dilettantism, and we, with our archaic predilections, are fundamentally incapable of appreciating these masterpieces of form. We delight in primitive simplicity. We enjoy the hard, childishly clumsy construction, the jerky, breathless style of the precursors, and neither understand nor value the artistically rounded, sonorous periods of their successors.

But even when the thesis is more familiar, as when the Cinquecentists treat the old simple themes of the Gospel cycle, the indifference of the public is still comprehensible. It feels itself on insecure ground, and cannot tell whether it should accept the gestures and ideas of classic art as genuine. It has had to swallow so much false classicism, that it turns with

INTRODUCTION zest to coarser but purer fare. We have lost faith in the grandiose. We

have become weak and distrustful, and evervwhere we detect theatrical

sentiment and empty declamation.

And the factor that counts for most in our distrust is the perpetual

suggestion that this art is not original, that it derives from the antique, f that the marble world of the buried past laid a deathly hand on the I blooming life of the Renaissance.

I Yet classic art is but the natural sequence of the Quattrocento, a i perfectly spontaneous manifestation of the Italian genius. It was not the outcome of imitation of a foreign exemplar — the antique — it was no |[ product of schools, but a hardy growth, springing up at a period of most 1 vigorous life.

This correlation has been obscured for us, because — and herein perhaps lies the real ground of the prejudice against Italian classicism — a purely

(national movement has been taken for universal, and forms which have life and meaning only under certain skies and on certain soil have been reproduced under whollv different conditions. The art of the High i Renaissance in Italy is Italian art, and its idealisation of reality was after ]| all, but an idealisation of Italian realities.

Vasari himself so divided his work as to open a new section with the ' sixteenth century, that period in relation to which the earlier stages were to appear but as preliminary and preparatory. He begins the third division of his art-history with Leonardo. Leonardo's Last Supper was painted in the last decade of the fifteenth century. It was the first great work of the new art. ^Michelangelo made his (Uhit at the same time. I Nearly twenty-five years younger than the Milanese, he too had new things to say in his very first works. Fra Bartolommeo was his contemporary. Raphael followed at an interval of about ten years, and Andrea del Sarto came close upon him. Broadly speaking, the first twenty-five years of the sixteenth century are taken as representative of the classic evolution in Romano-Florentine art.

It is not altogether easy to take a general survey of this epoch. Familiar as its masterpieces have been made to us from our youth up by means of engravings and reproductions of all kinds, it is only by slow degrees that we can form a coherent and lively idea of the world that bore these fruits. It is otherwise with the Quattrocento. The fifteenth century still lives before our eyes in Florence. ^luch has disappeared.

'1 much has been removed from its natural setting to the prisons of the museums, but still, there are many places left in which one seems to breathe the very air of the period. The Cinquecento is represented in more fragmentary fashion ; in ftict, it never achieved complete expression. In Florence one feels that the vast substructure of the Cinquecento lacks its crown. The final development is not clearly apparent. I am not alluding to the early removal of easel pictures, in consequence of which there is very little of Leonardo's left in Italy, but to the dissipation of forces that took place in the very beginning. Leonardo's Last Supper, which belongs incontrovertibly to Florence, was painted for Milan. Michelangelo became half-Roman, Kaphael wholly so. But among their Roman achievements are the Sistine ceiling, an absurdity, a penance to the artist and the spectator, and those paintings Raphael was obliged to execute on walls in the Vatican, where no one can see them properly. Of the rest, how much was actually finished, how much of the short period of perfection went further than the initial project, and how much escaped immediate destruction 't Leonardo's Last Su])per itself is a wreck. His great battle-piece, destined for Florence, was never completed, and even the cartoon is lost. Michelangelo's Bathing Soldiers shared the same fate. Of the tomb of Julius II., only two figures were executed, and the facade of San Lorenzo, which was to have been a mirror reflecting the soul of Tuscan architecture and sculpture, was never carried out. The Medici Chapel is only a partial compensation ; already it verges on the baroque. Classic art has left us no monument in the great style, in which architecture and sculpture are welded together for perfect expression ; and the great achievement of architecture, in which all the artistic forces of the age combined, St. Peter's at Rome, Avas destined after all to be no true monument of the High Renaissance.

Classic art then may be likened to the ruins of an unfinished building, the original form of which must be reconstructed from fragments widely scattered and from imperfect tradition, and there is perhaps much justice in the assertion that in all the history of Italian art there is no more obscure epoch than that of its golden age.

PAET I

I

PRELBIINAllY SURVEY

Italian Painting begins with Giotto. It was he who loosened the tongue of art. AA^hat he painted has a voice, and what he relates becomes an experience. He explored the wide circle of human emotion, he discoursed of sacred history and the legends of the saints, and everywhere of actual, living things. The heart of the incident is always plucked out, the scene, with its effect upon the beholders, is always brought before us, just as it must have taken place. Giotto, like the preachers and poets of the school of St. Francis of Assisi, undertook to expound the sacred story, and to elucidate it by intimate details ; but the essence of his achievement is to be found, not in poetic invention, but in pictorial presentment, in the rendering of things that no one had hitherto been able to give in painting. He had an eye for the speaking elements of a scene, and perhaps painting never made such a sudden advance in expressive power as in his time. Giotto must not be looked upon as a kind of Christian Romantic, who bore about in his pocket the outpourings of a Franciscan brother, and whose art had blossomed under the inspiration of that infinite love bv which the Saint of Assisi drew heaven down to earth, and made the world an Eden. He was no enthusiast, but a man of realities ; no poet, but an observer ; an artist who is never carried away by the ardour of his eloquence, but whose speech is always limpid and expressive.

Others surpassed him in fervour of emotion and in force of passion. Giovanni Pisano, the sculptor, shows more soul in his more inflexible material than the painter Giotto. The story of the Annunciation could not have been more tenderly told in the spirit of that age than by Giovanni in his relief on the pulpit at Pistoja, and in his more passionate scenes there is something of Dante's fiery spirit. But this very quahty was his undoing. He forced expression too far. The desire to express emotion destroyed the sense of form, and the master's art ran riot.

Giotto is cahner, cooler, more equable. His popularity will never wane, for all can understand him. The rough traits of national life appealed to him more strongly than its refinements, and he sought his effects in clarity rather than in beauty of line. His works are curiously lacking in that harmonious sweep of draperies, those rhythmic movements and attitudes which constituted style in his generation. Compared with those of Giovanni Pisano, they are clumsy, and with those of Andrea Pisano, the master of the brazen gates of the Baptistery at Florence, absolutely ugly. The grouping of the two women who embrace and the servant attending them in Andrea's Vwitation, is a sculptured melody. Giotto's rendering is hard, but extraordinarily expressive. One does not easily forget the line of his Elizabeth bending down to look into the Virgin's face (Chapel of the Arena, Padua) ; whereas of Andrea's group one retains but a vague impression of harmonious curves.

Giotto's art reached its highest expression in the frescoes of Santa Croce. In clarity of representation he here went beyond all his earlier works, and in composition he essayed effects which entitle him, in intention at least, to rank beside the masters of the sixteenth century. His own immediate successors could not understand this aspect of his art. Simplicity and concentration were again abandoned ; painters desired above all things to be rich and varied ; in the effort to be profound, they produced pictures that were confused and ambiguous. Then, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, a painter appeared who set things right by his vigorous initiative, and determined the pictorial aspects of the visible world. This master was Masaccio.

The student at Florence should not fail to see Masaccio immediately after Giotto, in order to note the difference in all its intensity. The contrast is amazing.

Vasari makes a remark about Masaccio, which has a somewhat trivial and obvious sound. " He recognised that painting is but the imitation of things as they are." ^ One might ask why the same should not have been said of Giotto. The sentence has probably a meaning deeper than the superficial one. What now seems to us a connnonplace — that painting 1 Vasari, Le Vite (ed. Milanesi), II. 288.

should give an impression of reality — was not always an axiom. There was a time when this requirement was quite unknown, and for the sufficient reason, that it was believed to be essentially impossible to suggest the tactile quality of material objects on a flat surface. This was the received opinion of the whole mediaeval period. Men were content with a representation that merely suggested objects and their relation to one another in space, without any idea of inviting a comparison with Nature. It is a mistake to suppose that a mediaeval picture was ever approached with our preconceptions of illusory effect. It was undoubtedly one of the greatest advances achieved by humanity, when this limitation was recognised as prejudicial, and when men began to believe that it might be possible to achieve something which should come near to the actual impression made by Nature, though the effects might be produced by very different means. No one man could have brought about such a re-adjustment of ideas. A single generation indeed could not suffice. Giotto did something towards it; but Masaccio added so much, that he was very justly described as the first artist Mho attained to " the imitation of things as they are.""

First of all, he amazes us by his thorough mastery of the problems of space. In his hands for the first time a picture became a stage, in the construction of which a certain fixed point of sight was kept steadily in view, a space in which persons, trees and houses had then- duly and geometrically determined places. In Giotto's works everything was still massed together ; he superimposed head above head, without asking himself how their respective bodies Avere to find places, and the architecture of the background has the appearance of unsubstantial stage scenery, bearing no sort of actual proportion to the figures. Masaccio not only portrays possible, habitable houses, but gives a sense of space that extends to the last line of his landscapes. His point of sight is taken on a level with the heads, and the crowns of the heads of figures on the equal surfaces are therefore all of a height. This gives an extraordinary appearance of solidity to a row of three heads in profile, one behind the other, terminating perhaps with a fourth head, seen full-face. Step by step we are led into the depths of the given space ; everything is ranged in clearly defined strata, one behind the other. The student who wishes to see the new art in all its glory should go to Santa Maria Novella, and study the fresco of the Trinity. Here, by the aid of architecture, and the use of intersections, four zones are developed towards the background, and the illusion of space is astonishing. Beside this, Giotto's work looks absolutely flat. His frescoes in Santa Croce have the effect of a carpet ; the uniform blue of the sky suffices in itself to bind the various pictures together in a common effect of flatness. It would seem as if the artist had had no idea of laying hold of some element of reality ; the flat surface of the division is at best uniformly filled up to the top, as if the painter had been required to decorate it in some ornamental fashion. All round the design are bands with mosaic patterns, and when these patterns are again repeated in the picture itself, the imagination is not constrained to make any distinction between the frame and the thing enframed, and the suggestion of a flat wall-decoration becomes unpleasantly obtrusive. Masaccio enframes his scenes between painted pilasters, and seeks to produce the illusion of a continuation of the picture behind these.

Giotto barely indicates the shadows cast by solid bodies, and for the most part altogether ignores the shadow cast by a body in light upon a light ground. It was not that he had never noticed them, but that it seemed to him unnecessarv to insist upon them. He looked upon them as disturbing accidents in a picture, bv which the subject was in no wise elucidated. In Masaccio's hands, light and shade become elements of flrstrate importance. It seemed to him essential to render the actual condition of things, and to show the full force of natural effects on material objects. His manner of treating a head with a few vigorous indications of form gives a totally new impression. Bulk is expressed here with unprecedented power. And it is the same with all other forms. As a natural consequence of this treatment, the high tones of the earlier pictures with their shadowy effects give place to a more substantial system of colour.

The whole structure of pictures was consolidated, so to speak, and here we may appropriately quote another remark of Vasari's, to the effect that it was Masaccio who first made figures stand on their feet.

Besides this there is something else, the intensified feeling for the personal, for the peculiarities of the individual. Even Giotto differentiates his figures, but his are only general distinctions. Masaccio gives us clearly marked individual characteristics. The new age is termed the century of ' Realism.' The word has now passed through so many hands that it no longer has any clear meaning. Something proletarian clings to it, a semblance of bitter opposition, where coarse ugliness wishes to force itself in, and claims its rights, since it too exists in the world. The quattrocentist realism is, however, essentially joyous. It is the higher estimate, which brinies new elements. Interest is no Ioniser confined to the individual head, but the vast variety of individual attitudes and movements is included in the realm of worthy motives for representation, attention is given to the will and mood of each particular material, and the artist rejoices in the stubborn line. The old laws of beauty seemed to do violence to nature ; the swaying attitude, the varied modulations of the drapery, were felt to be merely beautiful phrases, of which men had become weary. A mighty need arose for reality, and if one thing shows sincere belief in the value of the newly comprehended sense of vision more strongly than another, it is the circumstance that even supernatural beings for the first time appear credible in earthly dress, with individual features, and without a trace of idealism in their representation.

It was not a painter, but a sculptor, in whom the new spirit was next destined to manifest itself most synthetically. Masaccio died young, and tl could therefore but briefly express himself, but Doxatkllo is a conspicuous j figure throughout the entire first half of the fifteenth century ; his works form a long series, and he is indisputably the most important personality of the Quattrocento. He took up the peculiar tasks of the time with unrivalled energy, and yet he was never carried away by the one-sidedness of an unbridled realism. He was a portrayer of men who pursued the characteristic form to the very depths of ugliness, and then again in all calm and purity, reproduced the image of a tranquil and bewitching beauty. There are statues of his in which he drains an abnormal individuality to the very dregs, as it were, and side by side with these are figures like the bronze David., where the High Renaissance feeling for beauty already rings out clear and true. He is withal a storyteller of unsurpassable vividness and dramatic force. A panel like the St. John relief at Siena may be fitly designated the best narrative of the century. At a later date, in the Miracles of' St. Anthou?j at Padua, he attacks veritable cinquecentist problems, introducing excited and dramatic crowds, which, compared with the quiet rows of bystanders in contemporary pictures, represent a really memorable anachronism.