in anatomy,
modelling, perspective, and so forth, always laborious and frequently
abortive, its only spontaneous, satisfactory, mature production was its
portrait work, Portraits of burghers in black robes and hoods; of
square-jawed youths with red caps stuck on to their fuzzy heads, of bald
and wrinkled scholars and magnificoes; of thinly bearded artizans;
people who stand round the preaching Baptist or crucified Saviour, look
on at miracle or martyrdom, stolid, self-complacent, heedless, against
their background of towered, walled, and cypressed city--of buttressed
square and street; ugly but real, interesting, powerful among the
grotesque agglomerations of bag-of-bones nudities, bunched and taped-up
draperies and out-of-joint architecture of the early Renaissance
frescoes; at best among its picture-book and Noah's-ark prettinesses of
toy-box cypresses, vine trellises, inlaid house fronts, rabbits in the
grass, and peacocks on the roofs; for the early Renaissance, with the
one exception of Masaccio, is in reality a childish time of art, giving
us the horrors of school-hour blunders and abortions varied with the
delights of nursery wonderland: maturity, the power of achieving, the
perception of something worthy of perception, comes only with the later
generation, the one immediately preceding the age of Raphael and Michael
Angelo; with Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, Filippino, Botticelli, Perugino,
and their contemporaries.

But this period is not childish, is not immature in everything. Or,
rather, the various arts which exist together at this period are not all
in the same stage of development. While painting is in this immature
ugliness, and ideal sculpture, in works like Verrocchio's and
Donatello's David, only a cleverer, more experienced, but less
legitimate kind of painting, painting more successful in the present,
but with no possible future; the almost separate art of
portrait-sculpture arises again where it was left by Graeco-Roman
masters, and, developing to yet greater perfection, gives in marble the
equivalent of what painting will be able to produce only much later:
realistic art which is decorative; beautiful works made out of ugly
materials.

The vicissitudes of Renaissance sculpture are strange: its life, its
power, depend upon death; it is an art developed in the burying vault
and cloister cemetery. During the Middle Ages sculpture had had its
reason, its vital possibility, its something to influence, nay