208 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

audacious violations of proportion admitted, as in the limbs of Michael Angelo’s sitting Madonna in the Uffizii;¹ all artifices, also, of deep and sharp cutting being allowed, to gain the shadowy and spectral expressions about the brow and lip which the mere actualities of form could not have conveyed;-the sculptor never following a material model, but feeling after the most momentary and subtle aspects of the countenance-striking these out sometimes suddenly, by rude chiselling, and stopping the instant they are attained-never risking the loss of thought by the finishing of flesh surface. The heads of the Medici sacristy² we believe to have been thus left unfinished, as having already the utmost expression which the marble could receive, and incapable of anything but loss from further touches. So with Mino da Fiesole and Jacopo della Quercia,³ the workmanship is often hard, sketchy, and angular, having its full effect only at a little distance; but at that distance the statue becomes ineffably alive, even to startling, bearing an aspect of change and uncertainty, as if it were about to vanish, and withal having a light, and sweetness, and incense of passion upon it that silences the looker-on, half in delight, half in expectation. This daring stroke-this transfiguring tenderness-may be shown to characterize all truly Christian sculpture, as compared with the antique, or the pseudo-classical of subsequent periods. We agree with Lord Lindsay in thinking the Psyche of Naples⁴ the nearest approach to the Christian ideal of all ancient efforts; but even in this the approximation is more accidental than real-a fair type of feature, further exalted by the mode in which the imagination supplies the lost upper folds of the hair. The fountain of life and emotion remains sealed; nor was the opening of that

¹ [The reference is to the circular “Madonna and Child, with the child St. John,” formerly in the Uffizi, and now in the Bargello. A photograph of it is reproduced at p. 120 of Sir Charles Holroyd’s Michael Angelo Buonarroti.]

² [Compare Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 118.]

³ [For Mino da Fiesole, see again Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 280 and n.; for Jacopo della Quercia, ibid. (Vol. IV. p. 122).]

⁴ [The well-known fragment, found at the amphitheatre of Capua, in the Hall of the Capolavori in the Museum at Naples.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]