I. EARLY RENAISSANCE 19

turned to good account the whole science of his day, nothing is more exquisite. I do not believe, for instance, that there is a more glorious work of sculpture existing in the world than that equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleone, by Verrocchio, of which, I hope, before these pages are printed, there will be a cast in England.¹ But when the cinquecento work has been done by those meaner men, who, in the Gothic times, though in a rough way, would yet have found some means of speaking out what was in their hearts, it is utterly inanimate,-a base and helpless copy of more accomplished models; or, if not this, a mere accumulation of technical skill, in gaining which the workman had surrendered all other powers that were in him.

There is, therefore, of course, an infinite gradation in the art of the period, from the Sistine Chapel down to modern upholstery; but, for the most part, since in architecture the workman must be of an inferior order, it will be found that this cinque-cento painting and higher religious sculpture is noble, while the cinque-cento architecture, with its subordinate sculpture, is universally bad; sometimes, however, assuming forms in which the consummate refinement almost atones for the loss of force.

¹ [For other references to this statue, see Vol. X. p. 8; below, Venetian Index, p. 384; and Aratra Pentelici, § 157. See also in a later volume of this edition the account of the Ruskin Museum at Sheffield. Ruskin’s first note of the statue is in his 1846 diary:-

“(PADUA, MAY 28.)-His equestrian statue in front of the Church of S. Giovanni e Paolo at Venice is the finest I have ever seen-the set of it is the most living, muscular, and resolute conceivable; the limbs straight so as to come out far from the horse’s belly when seen in front; the armour of the foot turned down at the point over the stirrup, so as to give it a grasp and weight; the left shoulder flung forward so that the arm holding the bridle takes something of the action of holding a shield; the right arm drawn back with the truncheon as in Turner’s Jason; the consequence of throwing the left shoulder so far forward is necessarily to render that side, when seen too far behind, a little heavy, but the face, which looks over that shoulder forward, is superb, the very type of soldierly resolution; a little verging on fierceness, but in the profile seen from the right side it becomes almost mild; the expression depends mainly on the dark undercutting of the eyes, as in the Lorenzo.”

For Michael Angelo’s “Lorenzo,” see Vol. IV. p. 282; for Turner’s “Jason,” Vol. IV. p. 259. Plaster casts of portions of the ornamented saddle-cloth, and the front of the helmet, which Ruskin had taken from the statue of Colleone, are in the Sheffield museum; the full-size cast to which he refers, of the entire statue, is at the Crystal Palace: see Fors Clavigera, Letter 74 (notes and correspondence).]

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