s
further manifested in his work in the Cappella Colleoni at Bergamo. We
there learn to know him, not only as an enthusiastic cultivator of the
mingled Christian and pagan manner of the _quattrocento_, but as an artist
in the truest sense of the word sympathetic. The sepulchral portrait of
Medea, daughter of the great Condottiere, has a grace almost beyond that
of Della Quercia's "Ilaria."[114] Much, no doubt, is due to the peculiarly
fragile beauty of the girl herself, who lies asleep with little crisp
curls clustering upon her forehead, and with a string of pearls around her
slender throat. But the sensibility to loveliness so delicate, and the
power to render it in marble with so ethereal a touch upon the rigid
stone, belong to the sculptor, and win for him our worship.

The list of fifteenth-century sculptors is almost ended; and already, on
the threshold of the sixteenth, stands the mighty form of Michael Angelo.
Andrea Contucci da Sansavino and his pupil Jacopo Tatti, called also
Sansovino, after his master, must, however, next be mentioned as
continuing the Florentine tradition without subservience to the style of
Buonarroti. Andrea da Sansavino was a sculptor in whom for the first time
the faults of the mid-Renaissance period are glaringly apparent. He
persistently sacrificed simplicity of composition to decorative
ostentation, and tranquillity of feeling to theatrical effect. The truth
of this will be acknowledged by all who have studied the tombs of the
cardinals in S. Maria del Popolo already mentioned,[115] and the
bas-reliefs upon the Santa Casa at Loreto. In technical workmanship Andrea
proved himself an able craftsman, modelling marble with the plasticity of
wax, and lavishing patterns of the most refined invention. Yet the
decorative prodigality of this master corresponded to the frigid and
stylistic graces of the neo-Latin poets. It was so much mannerism--adopted
without real passion from the antique, and applied with a rhetorical
intention. Those acanthus scrolls and honeysuckle borders, in spite of
their consummate finish, fail to arrest attention, leaving the soul as
unstirred as the Ovidian cadences of Bembo.

Jacopo Tatti was a genius of more distinction. Together with San Gallo and
Bramante he studied the science of architecture in Rome, where he also
worked at the restoration of newly discovered antiques, and cast in bronze
a copy of the "Laocoon." Thus equipped with the artistic learning of his