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In this, they reminded me much of the Spaniards and the Italians. Their perception seems to be so keen that frequently they see more than really is visible. They are much given to exaggeration, not only in what they say, but also in their representations in painting and sculpture.
In the procession of the fine arts, sculpture always follows close upon the steps of architecture, and at first appears in some sense as her handmaid. Mediaeval Italy found her Pheidias in a great man of Pisan origin, born during the first decade of the thirteenth century.
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 Greeks who were acquainted with it at least as early as the time of Homer gradually introduced ivory as a material for sculpture. In certain forms of combination with gold, it gave origin to the art of chryselephantine sculpture, so called from the Greek primitives, gold and ivory.
A hard task to judge between them. But be this as it may, it is one of the singular richnesses of the Italian Renaissance that it knew of both tendencies; that while in painting it gave the equivalent of that rigid idealism of the Greeks which can make no compromise with ugliness; in sculpture it possessed the equivalent of the realism of Velasquez, which can make beauty out of ugly things, even as the chemist can make sugar out of vitriol.
The noble piece of sculpture forming the facade represents the various stages of human life three female figures composing the group the Hour that is gone, the Hour that is here, the Hour that is coming. Simple as is the arrangement of the whole, nevertheless, so skilful is the pourtrayal that each figure seems to move before our eyes.
When sculpture and painting cease to be representative they pass into the same category. Decoration in turn merges in construction; and so all art, like the whole Life of Reason, is joined together at its roots, and branches out from the vital processes of sensation and reaction.
And, as we have already noted, by making use of the block as a sort of background, even some relation of man to his environment can be represented. Through the group the simpler relations of man with his fellows comradeship, love, conflict, or common action can be expressed; although the power of sculpture is greatly limited in this direction.
This is indeed the explanation of what I mentioned at the outset as the chief characteristic of this sculpture, the academic inelasticity, namely, with which it essays to reproduce the Renaissance romanticism.
You have thus separated building from sculpture, and you have taken away the power of both; for the sculptor loses nearly as much by never having room for the development of a continuous work, as you do from having reduced your work to a continuity of mechanism.
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