At Works, 4.194, and at Works, 4.279 Bandinelli and Canova are cited as examples unimaginative work, and contrasted with Mino da Fiesole and Michelangelo. At Works, 4.279 Ruskin refers with approval to Cellini's account of the Hercules and Cacus by Bandinelli. Cellini starts wit h the head: he suggests that if the hair were cut off the Hercules there would not be enough skull to hold a brain; that it is unclear whether the face is like a man or a cross between a lion and an ox; it does not look the right way; it is badly set upon to the neck. Cellini moves down the body in the same style and finishes at the feet ( Cellini, Life, p. 356).
Ruskin 's notebook of 1845 quoted at Works, 4.280n. compares Bandinelli's Dead Christ in the Baroncelli Chapel with a 'bad statue of a dying French duellist or gamester'. He goes on to suggest that the 'purity of marble is destroyed by the man's vulgar conception'. At Works, 12.404 Ruskin cites Bandinelli as evidence of the absurdity to which notions of progress can lead. Only the 'shallowest materialism of modern artists would assume' that Bandinelli and Cellini superseded Nino Pisano just because they were later. Cellini would not have been happy to be bracketed with Bandinelli in Ruskin's comment.