if eventually
destined for marble, was conceived by a man having the habit of
modelling in clay.

[Footnote 13: I am confirmed in these particulars by my friend
Miss Eugenie Sellers, whose studies of the ancient authorities on
art--Lucian, Pausanias, Pliny, and others, will be the more fruitful
that they are associated with knowledge--uncommon in archaeologists--of
more modern artistic processes.]

[Footnote 14: This becomes overwhelmingly obvious on reading Professor
Furtwaengler's great "Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture." Praxiteles
appears to have been exceptional in his preference for marble.]

Let us turn from early Greece to mediaeval Italy. Hammered iron had
superseded bronze for weapons and armour, and silver and gold, worked
with the chisel, for ornaments. On the other hand, the introduction from
the East of glazed pottery had banished to the art of the glass-blower
all fancy in shaping utensils. There was no demand in common life for
cast metal-work, and there being no demand for casting, there was no
practice either in its cognate preliminary art of moulding clay. Hence,
such bronze work as originated was very unsatisfactory; the lack of
skill in casting, and the consequent elaboration of bronze-work with the
file, lasting late into the Renaissance. But the men of the Middle Ages
were marvellously skilful carvers of stone. Architecture, ever since the
Roman time, had given more and more importance to sculptured ornament:
already exquisite in the early Byzantine screens and capitals, it
developed through the elaborate mouldings, traceries, and columns of
the Lombard style into the art of elaborate reliefs and groups of the
full-blown Gothic; indeed the Gothic church is, in Italy, the work no
longer of the mason, but of the sculptor. It is no empty coincidence
that the hillside villages which still supply Florence with stone and
with stonemasons should have given their names to three of its greatest
sculptors, Mino da Fiesole, Desiderio da Settignano, and Benedetto da
Maiano; that Michelangelo should have told Vasari that the chisel and
mallet had come to him with the milk of his nurse, a stonecutter's wife
from those same slopes, down which jingle to-day the mules carting
ready-shaped stone from the quarries. The mediaeval Tuscans, the Pisans
of the thirteenth, and the Florentines of the fifteenth century, evidently
made small wax or clay sketches of their statues; but their works are
conceiv