th a nail the few large strokes of the point which gave the firmness
to the strained muscle or stretched skin. Out of this model of his, this
plain old burgess, he and his docile friend the light, could make quite
a new thing; a new pattern of bosses and cavities, of smooth sweeps and
tracked lines, of creases and folds of flesh, of pliable linen and rough
brocade of dress: something new, something which, without a single
feature being straightened or shortened, yet changed completely the
value of the whole assemblage of features; something undreamed of by
nature in moulding that ugly old merchant or humanist. With this art
which produced works like Desiderio da Settignano's Carlo Marsuppini and
Benedetto da Maiano's Pietro Mellini, is intimately connected the art of
the great medallists of the Renaissance--Pasti, Guacialotti, Niccolo
Fiorentino, and, greatest of all, Pisanello. Its excellence depends
precisely upon its independence of the ideal work of Antiquity; nay,
even upon the fact that, while the ancients, striking their coins in
chased metal dies, obtained an astonishing minuteness and clearness of
every separate little stroke and dint, and were therefore forced into an
almost more than sculptural perfection of mere line, of mere profile and
throat and elaborately composed hair, a sort of sublime abstraction of
the possible beauty of a human face, as in the coins of Syracuse and
also of Alexander; the men of the fifteenth century employed the process
of casting the bronze in a concave mould obtained by the melting away of
a medallion in wax; in wax, which taking the living impress of the
artist's finger, and recalling in its firm and yet soft texture the real
substance of the human face, insensibly led the medallist to seek, not
sharp and abstract lines, but simple, strongly moulded bosses; not ideal
beauty, but the real appearance of life. It is, moreover, a significant
fact that while the men who, half a century or so later, made fine,
characterless die-stamped medals in imitation of the antique, Caradossi
and Benvenuto for instance, were goldsmiths and sculptors, workers with
the chisel, artists seeking essentially for abstract elegance of line;
the two greatest medallists of the early Renaissance, Vittore Pisano and
Matteo di Pasti, were both of them painters; and painters of the
Northern Italian school, to whom colour and texture were all important,
and linear form a matter of indifference. And indeed, if we l