, to keep
it alive, in architecture; but with the disappearance of Gothic building
disappears also the possibility of the sculpture which covers the
portals of Chartres and the belfry of Florence. The pseudo-classic
colonnades, entablatures, all the thin bastard Ionic and Corinthian of
Aberti and Bramante, did not require sculpture, or had their own little
supply of unfleshed ox-skulls, greengrocer's garlands, scallopings and
wave-linings, which, with a stray siren and one or two bloated emperors'
heads, amply sufficed. On the other hand, mediaeval civilization and
Christian dogma did not encourage the production of naked of draped
ideal statues like those which Antiquity stuck on countless temple
fronts, and erected at every corner of square, street, or garden. The
people of the Middle Ages were too grievously ill grown, distorted,
hideous, to be otherwise than indecent in nudity; they may have had an
instinct of the kind, and, ugly as they knew themselves to be, they must
yet have found in forms like those of Verrocchio's David insufficient
beauty to give much pleasure. Besides, if the Middle Ages had left no
moral room for ideal sculpture once freed from the service of
architecture; they had still less provided it with a physical place.
Such things could not be set up in churches, and only a very moderate
number of statues could be wanted as open-air monuments in the narrow
space of a still Gothic city; and, in fact, ideal heroic statues of the
early Renaissance are fortunately not only ugly, but comparatively few
in number. There remained, therefore, for sculpture, unless contented to
dwindle down into brass and gold miniature work, no regular employment
save that connected with sepulchral monuments. During the real Middle
Ages, and in the still Gothic north, the ornamentation of a tomb
belonged to architecture: from the superb miniature minsters, pillared
and pinnacled and sculptured, cathedrals within the cathedral, to the
humbler foliated arched canopy, protecting a simple sarcophagus at the
corner of many a street in Lombardy. The sculptor's work was but the
low relief on the church flags, the timidly carved, outlined,
cross-legged knight or praying priest, flattened down on his pillow as
if ashamed even of that amount of prominence, and in a hurry to be
trodden down and obliterated into a few ghostly outlines. But to this
humiliated prostrate image, to this flat thing doomed to obliteration,
came the sculptor of