ree sculpture; they are, moreover, not merely unrelated to
each other in any essential sense, such as that in which the figures of
the Pisans and of Goujon are related; they are on the contrary each and
all wonderfully accentuated and individualized. Every ecclesiastic on
the Dijon tombs is a character study. Every figure on the Well has a
psychologic as well as a sculptural interest. Poised between Gothic
tradition and modern feeling, between a reverend and august aesthetic
conventionality and the dawn of free activity, Sluters is one of the
most interesting and stimulating figures in the whole history of
sculpture. And the force of his characterizations, the vividness of his
conceptions, and the combined power and delicacy of his modelling give
him the added importance of one of the heroes of his art in any time or
country. There is something extremely Flemish in his sense of
personality. A similar interest in humanity as such, in the individual
apart from the type, is noticeable in the pictures of the Van Eycks, of
Memling, of Quentin Matsys, and Roger Van der Weyden, wherein all idea
of beauty, of composition, of universal appeal is subordinated as it is
in no other art--in that of Holland no more than in that of Italy--to
the representation in the most definite, precise, and powerful way of
some intensely human personality. There is the same extraordinary
concreteness in one of Matsys's apostles and one of Sluters's prophets.

Michel Colombe, the pupil of Claux and Anthoniet and the sculptor of the
monument of Francois II., Duke of Brittany, at Nantes, the relief of
"St. George and the Dragon" for the Chateau of Gaillon, now in the
Louvre, and the Fontaine de Beaune, at Tours, and Jean Juste, whose
noble masterpiece, the Tomb of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany, is the
finest ornament of the Cathedral of St. Denis, bridge the distance and
mark the transition to Goujon, Cousin, and Germain Pilon far more
suavely than the school of Fontainebleau did the change from that of
Tours to Poussin. Cousin, though the monument of Admiral Chabot is a
truly marvellous work, witnessing a practical sculptor's hand, is really
to be classed among painters. And Germain Pilon's compromise with
Italian decorativeness, graceful and fertile sculptor as his many works
show him to have been, resulted in a lack of personal force that has
caused him to be thought on the one hand "seriously injured by the
bastard sentiment proper to the school