is subtle circumventing of distance, height, and darkness; this
victory of pattern over place; this reducing of light and shadow into
tools for the sculptor, mean, as we see from the above examples,
sacrificing the reality to the appearance, altering the proportions
and planes so rigorously reproduced by the Greeks, mean sacrificing the
sacred absolute form. And such a habit of taking liberties with what
can be measured by the hand, in order to please the eye, allowed the
sculptors of the Renaissance to think of their model no longer as
the homogeneous _white man_ of the Greeks, but as a creature in whom
structure was accentuated, intensified, or contradicted by colour and
texture.

Furthermore, these men of the fifteenth century possessed the cunning
carving which could make stone vary in texture, in fibre, and almost in
colour.

A great many biographical details substantiate the evidence of statues
and busts that the sculptors of the Renaissance carried on their business
in a different manner from the ancient Greeks. The great development in
Antiquity of the art of casting bronze, carried on everywhere for the
production of weapons and household furniture, must have accustomed
Greek sculptors (if we may call them by that name) to limit their personal
work to the figure modelled in clay. And the great number of their
works, many tediously constructed of ivory and gold, shows clearly that
they did not abandon this habit in case of marble statuary, but merely
gave the finishing strokes to a copy of their clay model, produced by
workmen whose skill must have been fostered by the apparently thriving
trade in marble copies of bronzes.

It was different in the Renaissance. Vasari recommends, as obviating
certain miscalculations which frequently happened, that sculptors should
prepare large models by which to measure the capacities of their block
of marble. But these models, described as made of a mixture of plaster,
size, and cloth shavings over tow and hay, could serve only for the
rough proportions and attitude; nor is there ever any allusion to any
process of minute measurement, such as pointing, by which detail could
be transferred from the model to the stone. Most often we hear of small
wax models which the sculptors enlarged directly in the stone. Vasari,
while exaggerating the skill of Michelangelo in making his David out of
a block mangled by another sculptor, expresses no surprise at his having
chopped the marble