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Two hogs, dormant, guarded either side of the door-step and refused so absolutely to be disturbed by the flicking of the towel that one was tempted to look twice to assure himself that they were not the fruits of the sculptor’s chisel. "Where’s your wife?" sternly demanded the fat lady. "Oh, my Lord! I presume she’s dancin’ a whole lot over to Ervay.
Tiberio had the sense and good feeling not to touch his master’s own work, but only carved the base and the drapery; the face of the bust remains a magnificent specimen of the great sculptor’s handiwork. This powerfully-conceived head is said to have been taken from a small intaglio cut in cornelian. It has been pointed out that the chisel marks are cut by both the right and left hand.
Not the maker of books,—what words call down light on the glancing eyes, on the moving lines of colour? Not the artist,—his pencil may not limn ten thousand human beings, beautiful and glad, sweeping in bright array across the welcoming city. Nor can the sculptor’s marble shape the marching forms, the rippling draperies, the warm and buoyant life. The life of Athens was the crown of Greece.
Over the Altar, and in front of it, were painted panels, enriched with gold, and translucent enamel over colour. If we could picture to ourselves the manner of the sculptor’s work we may recall the “Vine-Capital” in Rheims Cathedral, where the very stone itself seems to have been metamorphosed into tender foliage by the unknown artist.
With these exceptions, every individual appeared free from those blemishes which sometimes mar the effect of an otherwise perfect form. But their physical excellence did not merely consist in an exemption from these evils; nearly every individual of their number might have been taken for a sculptor’s model.
For sculptor’s work they were utterly useless; for no artist except the most daring of realists would have ventured to indicate the horrors which they presented. Fiddyes refused to receive them. Dr. Carnell, hard and cruel as he was, for kindness’ sake, in his profession, was a gentle, genial father of a family of daughters.
Vasari informs us that Michael Angelo’s old friend, Tomaso dei Cavalieri, superintended the work after the great sculptor’s death; we may trust him not to have departed from the master’s plans. Another scheme that interested Michael Angelo considerably was the design for the church that the Florentine residents in Rome wished to erect to their patron saint, San Giovanni.
The festival of the Panathenæa was the crown of Athens. Never had Helios looked down on fairer landscape or city. The doors of the patrician houses were opened; for a day unguarded, unconstrained, the daughters, wives, and mothers of the nobility of Athens walked forth in their queenly beauty. One could see that the sculptor’s master works were but rigid counterparts of lovelier flesh and blood.
“Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure Were to spare Death, had never made erasure; But every living lineament was clear As in the sculptor’s thought; and there The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy and pine, Like winter-leaves o’ergrown by moulded snow, Seemed only not to move and grow, Because the crystal silence of the air Weighed on their life....”
The rest of the four works that were the outcome of this commission can have had nothing to do with the chisel of the sculptor of the Madonna della Febbre and the David. Michael Angelo must have merely contracted to supply them, as the master sculptor of a sculptor’s yard, possibly furnishing the designs himself.
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