t craftsman
that had ever lived; and Domenico spoke of him as, in Vasari's day, men
were to speak of Michelangelo.

For I ask you, who save an angel in human shape could have modelled that
David, so young and triumphant and modest, treading on Goliath's head,
with toes just slightly turned downwards, and those sandals, of truly
divine workmanship? And that St. John in the Wilderness--how beautiful
are not his ribs, showing under the wasted pectoral muscles; and how one
sees that the _radius_ rolls across the _ulna_ in the forearm; surely
one's heart, rather than the statue, must be made of stone if one can
contemplate without rapture the exquisite rendering of the texture where
the shin-bone stands out from the muscles of the leg. Such must have
been the works of those famous Romans and Greeks, Phidias and Praxiteles.

Such were the notions of Domenico of Volterra in the earlier part of his
career. For a change came gradually upon him after his first visit to
Rome, whither, about 1480, he accompanied Botticelli, Rosselli, and
Ghirlandaio, whom His Beatitude Pope Sixtus had sent for to decorate the
new chapel of the palace.

II

We must not be deluded, like Domenico Neroni during his Florentine days,
into the easy mistake of considering mere realism as the veritable aim
of the art of his days. Deep in the life of that art, and struggling
for ever through whatever passion for scientific accuracy, technical
skill, or pathetic expression, is the sense of line and proportion, the
desire for pattern, growing steadily till its triumph under Michelangelo
and Raphael.

This reveals itself earliest in architecture. The men of the fifteenth
century had lost all sense of the logic of construction. Columns,
architraves, friezes, and the various categories of actual stone
and brick work, occurred to them merely as so much line and curve,
applicable to the surface of their buildings, with not more reference
to their architecture than a fresco or an arras. The Pazzi Chapel, for
instance, is one agglomeration of architectural members which perform
no architectural function; but, taken as a piece of surface decoration,
say as a stencilling, what could be more harmonious? Or take Alberti's
famous church at Rimini; it is but a great piece of architectural
veneering, nothing that meets the eye doing any real constructive duty,
its exquisite decoration no more closely connected with the building
than the strips of damask and yards of