hich antique sculpture had succeeded; it
accomplished what Antiquity had left undone. Its sense of bodily beauty
was rudimentary; its knowledge of the nude alternately insufficient and
pedantic; the forms of Donatello's David and of Benedetto's St. John are
clumsy, stunted, and inharmonious; even Michelangelo's Bacchus is but
a comely lout. This sculpture has, moreover, a marvellous preference
for ugly old men--gross, or ascetically imbecile; and for ill-grown
striplings: except the St. George of Donatello, whose body, however, is
entirely encased in inflexible leather and steel, it never gives us the
perfection and pride of youth. These things are obvious, and set us
against the art as a whole. But see it when it does what Antiquity never
attempted; Antiquity which placed statues side by side in a gable,
balancing one another, but not welded into one pattern; which made
relief the mere repetition of one point of view of the round figure, the
shadow of the gable group; which, until its decline, knew nothing of the
pathos of old age, of the grotesque exquisiteness of infancy, of the
endearing awkwardness of adolescence; which knew nothing of the texture
of the skin, the silkiness of the hair, the colour of the eye.

III

Let us see Renaissance sculpture in its real achievement.

Here are a number of children by various sculptors of the fifteenth
century. This is the tiny baby whose little feet still project from a
sort of gaiter of flesh, whose little boneless legs cannot carry the fat
little paunch, the heavy big head. Note that its little skull is still
soft, like an apple, under the thin floss hair. Its elder brother or
sister is still vaguely contemplative of the world, with eyes that
easily grow sleepy in their blueness. Those a little older have learned
already that the world is full of solemn people on whom to practise
tricks; their features have scarcely accentuated, their hair has merely
curled into loose rings, but their eyes have come forward from below the
forehead, eyes and forehead working together already; and there are
great holes, into which you may dig your thumb, in the cheeks. Those of
fourteen or fifteen have deplorably thin arms, and still such terrible
calves; and a stomach telling of childish gigantic meals; but they have
the pert, humorous frankness of Verrocchio's David, who certainly flung
a jest at Goliath's unwieldy person together with his stone; or the
delicate, sentimental pretty woman