ny giants and satyrs, feeling that, by exhibiting forms
of lust, brutality, and animalism to the gaze of his fellow-countrymen, he
had sinned against the higher law revealed by Christianity. For a Greek
artist to have spoken thus would have been impossible. The Faun, the
Titan, and the Satyr had a meaning for him, which he sought to set forth
in accordance with the semi-religious, semi-poetical traditions of his
race; and when he was at work upon a myth of nature-forces, he well knew
that at the other end of the scale, separated by no spiritual barrier, but
removed to an almost infinite distance of refinement, Zeus, Phoebus, and
Pallas claimed his loftier artistic inspiration. Ammanati's confession, on
the contrary, betrays that schism between the conscience of Christianity
and the lusts let loose by ill-assimilated sympathy with antique
heathenism, which was a marked characteristic of the Renaissance. The
coarser passions, held in check by ecclesiastical discipline, dared to
emerge into the light of day under the supposed sanction of classical
examples. What the Visconti and the Borgias practised in their secret
chambers, the sculptors exposed in marble and the poets in verse. All
alike, however, were mistaken in supposing that antique precedent
sanctioned this efflorescence of immorality. No amount of Greek epigrams
by Strato and Meleager, nor all the Hermaphrodites and Priapi of Rome, had
power to annul the law of conduct established by the founders of
Christianity, and ratified by the higher instincts of the Middle Ages. Nor
again were artists justified before the bar of conscience in selecting the
baser elements of Paganism for imitation, instead of aiming at Greek
self-restraint and Roman strength of character. All this the men of the
Renaissance felt when they listened to the voice within them. Their work,
therefore, in so far as it pretended to be a reconstruction of the antique
was false. The sensuality it shared in common with many Greek and Roman
masterpieces, had ceased to be frank and in the true sense pagan. To shake
off Christianity, and to revert with an untroubled conscience to the
manners of a bygone age, was what they could not do.

The errors I have attempted to characterise did not, however, prevent the
better and more careful works of sculpture, executed in illustration of
classical mythology, from having a true value. The "Perseus" of Cellini
and some of Gian Bologna's statues belong to a class of a