visation. The hand, obedient to the
brain, has made it in one moment what it is, and no slow hours of labour
at the stone have dulled the first caprice of the creative fancy. Work,
therefore, which, if translated into marble, might have left our sympathy
unstirred, affects us with keen pleasure in the mould of plastic clay.
What prodigality of thought and invention has been lavished on the
terra-cotta models of unknown Italian artists! What forms and faces,
beautiful as shapes of dreams, and, like dreams, so airy that we think
they will take flight and vanish, lean to greet us from cloisters and
palace fronts in Lombardy! To catalogue their multitude would be
impossible. It is enough to select one instance out of many; this shall be
taken from the chapel of S. Peter Martyr in S. Eustorgio at Milan. High up
around the cupola runs a frieze of angels, singing together and dancing
with joined hands, while bells composed of fruits and flowers hang down
between them. Each angel is an individual shape of joy; the soul in each
moves to its own deep melody, but the music made of all is one. Their
raiment flutters, the bells chime; the chorus of their gladness falls like
voices through a star-lit heaven, half-heard in dreams and everlastingly
remembered.

Four sculptors, the younger contemporaries of Luca della Robbia, and
marked by certain common qualities, demand attention next. All the work of
Antonio Rossellino, Matteo Civitali, Mino da Fiesole, and Benedetto da
Majano, is distinguished by sweetness, grace, tranquillity, and
self-restraint--as though these artists had voluntarily imposed limits on
their genius, refusing to trespass beyond a traced circle of religious
subjects, or to aim at effects unrealisable by purity of outline, suavity
of expression, delicacy of feeling, and urbanity of style. The charm of
manner they possess in common, can scarcely he defined except by similes.
The innocence of childhood, the melody of a lute or song-bird as
distinguished from the music of an orchestra, the rathe tints of early
dawn, cheerful light on shallow streams, the serenity of a simple and
untainted nature that has never known the world--many such images occur
to the mind while thinking of the sculpture of these men. To charge them
with insipidity, immaturity, and monotony, would be to mistake the force
of genius and skill displayed by them. We should rather assume that they
confined themselves to certain types of tranquil beauty,