lliance with it, since commerce
brings wealth, and wealth seeks to ornament the palaces and gardens
which it has created or purchased. The sculptor's art was not born until
piety had already edifices in which to worship God, or pride the
monuments in which it sought the glories of a name; but it made rapid
progress as wealth increased and taste became refined; as the need was
felt for ornaments and symbols to adorn naked walls and empty spaces,
especially statuary, grouped or single, of men or animals,--a marble
history to interpret or reproduce consecrated associations. Churches
might do without them; the glass stained in every color of the rainbow,
the altar shining with gold and silver and precious stones, the pillars
multiplied and diversified, and rich in foliated circles, mullions,
mouldings, groins, and bosses, and bearing aloft the arched and
ponderous roof,--one scene of dazzling magnificence,--these could do
without them; but the palaces and halls and houses of the rich required
the image of man,--and of man not emaciated and worn and monstrous, but
of man as he appeared to the classical Greeks, in the perfection of form
and physical beauty. So the artists who arose with the revival of
commerce, with the multiplication of human wants and the study of
antiquity, sought to restore the buried statues with the long-neglected
literature and laws. It was in sculptured marbles that enthusiasm was
most marked. These were found in abundance in various parts of Italy
whenever the vast debris of the ancient magnificence was removed, and
were universally admired and prized by popes, cardinals, and princes,
and formed the nucleus of great museums.

The works of Michael Angelo as a sculptor were not numerous, but in
sublimity they have never been surpassed,--_non multa, sed multum_. His
unfinished monument of Julius II., begun at that pontiff's request as a
mausoleum, is perhaps his greatest work; and the statue of Moses, which
formed a part of it, has been admired for three hundred years. In this,
as in his other masterpieces, grandeur and majesty are his
characteristics. It may have been a reproduction, and yet it is not a
copy. He made character and moral force the first consideration, and
form subservient to expression. And here he differed, it is said by
great critics, from the ancients, who thought more of form than of moral
expression,--as may be seen in the faces of the Venus de Medici and the
Apollo Belvedere, matc