d to texture, which
would probably be unperceived in the presence of the more regal beauty
of line and colour harmonies, and which those who could obtain this
latter would employ only as much as they were conducive to such larger
beauties. And this beauty of texture opposed to texture and light
combined with surface is a very real thing; it is the great reality of
Renaissance sculpture: this beauty, resulting from the combination, for
instance, in a commonplace face, of the roughness and coarser pore of
the close shaven lips and chin with the smoothness of the waxy hanging
cheeks; the one catching the light, the other breaking it into a ribbed
and forked penumbra. The very perfection of this kind of work is
Benedetto da Maiano's bust of Pietro Mellini in the Bargello at
Florence. The elderly head is of strongly marked osseous structure, yet
fleshed with abundant and flaccid flesh, hanging in folds or creases
round the mouth and chin, yet not flobbery and floppy, but solid, though
yielding, creased, wrinkled, crevassed rather as a sandy hillside is
crevassed by the trickling waters; semi-solid, promising slight
resistance, waxy, yielding to the touch. But all the flesh has, as it
were, gravitated to the lower part of the face, conglomerated, or rather
draped itself, about the mouth, firmer for sunken teeth and shaving; and
the skin has remained alone across the head, wrinkled, yet drawn in
tight folds across the dome-shaped skull, as if, while the flesh
disappeared, the bone also had enlarged. And on the temples the flesh
has once been thick, the bone (seemingly) slight; and now the skin is
being drawn, recently, and we feel more and more every day, into a
radiation of minute creases, as if the bone and flesh were having a last
struggle. Now in this head there is little beauty of line (the man has
never been good-looking), and there is not much character in the sense
of strongly marked mental or moral personality. I do not know, nor care,
what manner of man this may have been. The individuality is one, not of
the mind but of the flesh. What interests, attaches, is not the
character or temperament, but the bone and skin, the creases and folds
of flesh. And herein also lies the beauty of the work. I do not mean its
interest or mere technical skill, I mean distinctly visible and artistic
beauty.

Thus does the sculptor of the Renaissance get beauty, visible beauty,
not psychologic interest, out of a plain human being; but t