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Italian craftsmen of the quattrocento were not averse to setting thus together, in one framework, the myths of our first parents and Alemena's son: partly perhaps because both subjects gave scope to the free treatment of the nude; but partly also, we may venture to surmise, because the heroism of Hellas counterbalanced the sin of Eden.
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.
Really Tuscan in its birth, the art of the Quattrocento became at last almost wholly Florentine, a flower of the Val d'Arno or of the hills about it, where even to-day at Settignano, at Fiesole, at Majano, at Rovezzano, you may see the sculptors at work in an open bottega by the roadside, the rough-hewn marble standing here and there in many sizes and shapes, the chips and fragments strewing the highway.
"With these," said John, his band stretched towards the wall. "With the type of the Quattrocento." He got upon his feet, and moved from picture to picture; and a fire, half indeed of mischief; but half it may be of real enthusiasm, glimmered in his eyes.
He was, in fact, the great anatomical student among the Quattrocento artists; and, having the same tastes, it was natural that to his workshop Signorelli should turn, in order to satisfy his own craving for knowledge of the structure of bones and muscles.
She had a moment of abstraction; but now, emerging from it, she used her eyeglass as a pointer, and indicatively swept the circle of painted eavesdroppers. "They make one feel like their grandmother, their youth is so flagrant," she sighed, "these grandmothers of the Quattrocento. Ah, well, we can only be old once, and we should take advantage of the privileges of age while we have 'em.
I've of course something that in our poor dear backward old Rome sufficiently passes for it. But it's no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase half-ruined into the bargain! in some castle of our quattrocento is like the `lightning elevator' in one of Mr. Verver's fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense works by steam it sends you up like a rocket.
Bellini cannot be called a master of the full Renaissance. He falls into the same class as Francia and Perugino, who adhered to quattrocento modes of thought and sentiment, while attaining at isolated points to the freedom of the Renaissance. In him the colourists of the next age found an absolute teacher; no one has surpassed him in the difficult art of giving tone to pure tints in combination.
Meanwhile no new stock of thoughts had been acquired; and students of history are now well aware that for really great art ideas common to the nation are essential. The motives suggested by mediaeval Christianity, after passing through successive stages of treatment in the quattrocento, had received the grand and humane handling of the golden age.
The arabesques, for instance, with which Luca wreathed his portraits of the poets, are monstrous, bizarre, in doubtful taste. Michelangelo, with a finer instinct for harmony, a deeper grasp on his own dominant ideal, excluded this element of quattrocento decoration from his scheme.
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