himself; indeed, the anecdote itself affords evidence
of the commonness of such a practice, since Agostino di Duccio would not
have spoilt the block if he had not cut into it rashly without previous
comparison with a model.[17] We hear, besides, that Jacopo della
Quercia spent twelve years over one of the gates of S. Petronio, and
that other sculptors carried out similar great works with the assistance
of one man, or with no assistance at all,--a proceeding which would have
seemed the most frightful waste except in a time and country where
half of the sculptors were originally stone-masons and the other half
goldsmiths, that is to say, men accustomed to every stage, coarse or
subtle, of their work. The absence of replicas of Renaissance sculpture,
so striking a contrast to the scores of repetitions of Greek works,
proves, moreover, that the actual execution in marble was considered
an intrinsic part of the sculpture of the fifteenth century, in the
same way as the painting of a Venetian master. Phidias might leave the
carving of his statues to skilful workmen, once he had modelled the
clay, even as the painters of the merely designing and linear schools,
Perugino, Ghirlandaio, or Botticelli, might employ pupils to carry out
their designs on panel or wall. But in the same way as a Titian is not a
Titian without a certain handling of the brush, so a Donatello is not a
Donatello, or a Mino not a Mino, without a certain individual excellence
in the cutting of the marble.

[Footnote 17: Several Greek vases and coins show the sculptor modelling
his figure; while in Renaissance designs, from that of Nanni di Banco
to a mediocre allegorical engraving in an early edition of Vasari, the
sculptor, or the personified art of Sculpture, is actually working with
chisel and mallet.]

These men brought, therefore, to the cutting of marble a degree of
skill and knowledge of which the ancients had no notion, as they had no
necessity. In their hands the chisel was not merely a second modelling
tool, moulding delicate planes, uniting insensibly broad masses of
projection and depression. It was a pencil, which, according as it was
held, could emphasise the forms in sharp hatchings or let them die away
unnoticed in subdued, imperceptible washes. It was a brush which could
give the texture and the values of the colour--a brush dipped in various
tints of light and darkness, according as it poured into the marble the
light and the sh