ook at the
best work of what I may call the wax mould medallists of the fifteenth
century, even at the magnificent marble medallions of the
laurel-wreathed head of Sigismund Malatesta on the pillars of his church
at Rimini, modelled by Pasti, we shall see that these men were
preoccupied almost exclusively with the almost pictorial effect of the
flesh in its various degrees of boss and of reaction of the light; and
that the character, the beauty even, which they attained, is essentially
due to a skilful manipulation of texture, and surface, and light--one
might almost say of colour. We all know Pisanello's famous heads of the
Malatesti of Rimini: the saturnine Sigismund, the delicate dapper
Novello, the powerful yet beautiful Isotta; but there are other
Renaissance medals which illustrate my meaning even better, and connect
my feelings on the subject of this branch of art more clearly with my
feelings towards such work as Benedetto's Pietro Mellini. Foremost among
these is the perhaps somewhat imperfect and decidedly grotesque, but
astonishingly powerful, naif and characteristic Lorenzo dei Medici by
Niccolo real grandeur of whose conception of this coarse yet imaginative
head may be profitably contrasted with the classicizing efforts after
the demi-god or successor of Alexander in Pollaiolo's famous medal of
the Pazzi conspiracy. Next to this I would place a medal by Guacialotti
of Bishop Niccolo Palmieri, with the motto, "Nudus egressus sic
redibo"--singularly appropriate to the shameless fleshliness of the
personage, with his naked fat chest and shoulders, his fat, pig-like
cheeks and greasy-looking bald head; a hideous beast, yet magnificent in
his bestiality like some huge fattened porker. These medals give us, as
does the bust of Pietro Mellini, beauty of the portrait despite ugliness
of the original. But there are two other medals, this time by Pisanello,
and, as it seems to me, perhaps his masterpieces, which show the quite
peculiar way in which this homely charm of portraiture amalgamates, so
as to form a homogeneous and most seemingly simple whole, with the
homely charm of certain kinds of pure and simple youthful types. One of
these (the reverse of which fantastically represents the four elements,
the wooded earth, the starry sky, the rippled sea, the sun, all in one
sphere) is the portrait of Don Inigo d'Avalos; the other that of Cecilia
Gonzaga. This slender beardless boy in the Spanish shovel hat and wisp
of