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She had even those traits of physiognomy, stern and wild, which the antique sculptors doubtless had surprised in supernatural visitations, and which they have stamped on the eyes and the lips of their marble gods. Her arms and shoulders, perfect in form, seemed models, in the midst of the rosy and virgin snow which covered the neighboring mountains. She was truly superb and bewitching.
The most purely mediæval sculpture, the sculpture which has, as it were, just detached itself from the capitals and porches of the cathedral, is the direct pupil of the antique; and the three great Gothic sculptors, Niccolò, Giovanni, and Andrea of Pisa, learn from fragments of Greek and Roman sculpture how to model the figure of the Redeemer and how to chisel the robe of the Virgin.
It was a glorious mouth, such as the old sculptors gave to their marble gods! And Burgo, if it was so that he had not heart enough to love truly, could look as though he loved. It was not in him deceit, or what men call acting.
This would enrich us beyond the dreams of avarice in a high-grade portrait statuary; it would give work to hundreds of sculptors who now have little or nothing to do, and would revive or create the supplementary industries of casting in metal or carving in stone. The time was in Genoa, it seems, as the time is now with us, when a great many people did not know what to do with their money.
The great fountain with its bronze figures at this corner is by Bartolommeo Ammanati, a pupil of Bandinelli, and the statue of Cosimo I is by Gian Bologna, who was the best of the post-Michelangelo sculptors and did much good work in Florence, as we shall see at the Bargello and in the Boboli Gardens. He studied under Michelangelo in Rome.
I have not quite made up my mind which are the greater nuisances; but I am sure of this, that there are too many of both. I am half-inclined to think that the sculptors club together to write folks up during their lives in the newspapers, quieting their consciences with the hope of some day making them look so mean in bronze or marble as to make all square again. Or do we really have so many?
Although Theodatus much preferred fun and frolic to hard labor, he entered cheerfully upon the business of a stone cutter at the age of sixteen. Abel marked the outlines of the letters upon incipient grave stones in pencil, and Theodatus carved them with his chisel. Most of the renowned sculptors of Ohio, such as Powell, Clevenger and Jones, took their first lessons in the same way.
"Living men have felt my blows: those many maimed and mutilated stones one sees, attest to your disgrace: the earth hides my bad work." See the lines quoted by Perkins, Tuscan Sculptors, vol. ii. p. 140. Lib. i. cap. 79. Lib. ii. cap. 34. The whole history of this woman Caterina, and of the revenge he took upon her and his prentice Paolo, is one of the most extraordinary passages in the life.
"The sculptors think him pre-eminently beautiful," answered Eudora; "or they would not so often copy his statue in the sacred images of Hermes. Socrates applied Anacreon's eloquent praise of Bathyllus to him, and said he saw in his lips 'Persuasion sleeping upon roses."
He also made acquaintance with two American sculptors, a Yankee and a girlish young woman, whose names are prudently withheld; for he afterward visited their studios, and readily discovered that they had no real talent for their profession. If we feel inclined to quarrel with Hawthorne anywhere, it is in his disparagement of Crawford.
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