l and
dramatic or sentimental isolated figure or group of modern days.

[Medals and Coins]

It is noteworthy, however, that even in the smaller works of the
modeller, carver, or sculptor of the Middle Ages or the early
Renaissance, a sense of decorative fitness and structural sense is
always present. We see it in the carved ornaments of seats and
furniture, in the design and treatment of coins and seals and gems and
medals. These latter from the time of the ancient Greeks afford
beautiful examples of the decorative treatment of relief in strict
relation to the object and purpose. The skill and taste of the Greeks
seemed to have been largely inherited by the artists of the earlier
Italian Renaissance, such as Pisano, whose famous medal of the Malatesta
of Rimini affords a splendid instance not only of the treatment of the
portrait and subject on the reverse perfectly adapted to its method and
purpose, but also of the artistic use of lettering as a decorative
feature (see p. 203[f110]).

[Illustration (f110): Medals of the Lords of Mantua, Cesena, and
Ferrara, by Vittore Pisano of Verona (Middle of the Fifteenth Century).]

The treatment and relief of figures and heads upon the plane surfaces of
metals and coins, the composition controlled by the circular form, have
always been a fine test of both modelling and decorative skill and
taste. Breadth is given by a flatness in the treatment of successive
planes of low relief, which rise to their highest projection from the
ground, in the case of a head in profile, about its centre. The delicate
perception of the relation of the planes of surface is important, as
well as the decorative effect to be obtained by arrangement of the light
and shade masses and the contrast of textures, such as hair and the
folds of drapery, to the smooth contours of faces and figures, and the
rectangular forms of lettering.

In gems we see the use made of the concave ground, which gives an
effective relief to the figure design in convex upon it. Bolder
projection of prominent parts are here necessary in contrast to the
retiring planes, the work being on so small a scale, and also in view of
its seal-like character; for, of course, it is the method of producing
form by incision, and modelling by cutting and hollowing out, that gives
the peculiar character to gems and seals; and it is in forming human
figures that the building up of the form