ntion
to itself, merges itself in the plot. Later, when the profounder idea of
a personality that does not isolate or degrade has begun to make itself
felt, this constraint is given up,--the figures face the spectator, and
enter as it were into relation with the actual world.

The Church very early expressed this feeling of the higher significance
of the head, by allowing it to be sufficient if the head alone were
buried in holy ground. In Art it is naively indicated by exaggerated
size of the head and of the eyes,--a very common trait of the earlier
times, and not quite obsolete at the time of the Pisani. This clumsy
expedient is relinquished, but the need it indicated continued, without
the possibility of finding any complete satisfaction in Sculpture,
instead of the intensity and directness that Art now insists upon,
Sculpture can give only extension and indirect hints; instead of mind
present, only its effects and products, with the working cause expressly
removed.

This is the ground of the seeming injustice to Sculpture at the time of
the Revival. Its relative excellence was undervalued, because what it
could do was not quite to the point. While the painters went on
producing their antediluvian forms, the sculptors saw things much more
as we do,--yet the paintings seemed the most life-like. It is
astonishing, when we remember that Nicola was older than Cimabue,
Giovanni than Giotto, Ghiberti than Fra Angelico, that the painters did
not learn from the sculptors more of the actual appearance of things. It
is still more astonishing that it is the painters that get all the
praise for accuracy. Vasari is endless in his praises of Giotto,
Spinello, Stefano, (called Scimia, or the Ape of Nature,) and a host of
others, for accurate imitation. Giovanni Villani boasts that "it is our
fellow-citizen Giotto who has portrayed most naturally every form and
action." Ghiberti finishes an admiring account of some paintings of
Ambrogio Lorenzotto's with the exclamation that it is truly marvellous
to think that all this is only a picture. Few persons, probably, would
see in the specimens of Ambrogio's work that still remain anything
wonderful for resemblance to Nature,--whilst in Ghiberti's everybody
acknowledges the astonishing truth of the detail. He tells us that he
sought "to imitate Nature as far as was possible to him,"--but he seems
not to be aware how much better he succeeded than the people he praises.
Paolo Uccello, who