, in its dawn and in
its splendour, till with Bandinelli and the pupils of Michelangelo it
loses itself in a noisy grandiosity, a futile gesticulation.

Realism, I said in speaking of the character of this fifteenth century
work, and indeed it is just there that we come upon the very thought of
the time. Sculpture is no longer content with mere beauty, it has
divined that something is wanting, yes, even in the almost miraculous
work of Niccolo Pisano himself; is it only an expression of character,
of the passing moment, of movement that is lacking, or something
comprising all these things--some indefinable radiance which is very
life itself? It is this question which seems to have presented itself to
the sculptors of the fifteenth century: and their work is their answer
to it.

For even as the philosophers and alchemists had sought so patiently for
life, for the very essence of it, through all the years of the Middle
Age, so art now set out in search of it, the greatest treasure of all,
and seems to have found it at last, not hardly or hidden away in some
precipitous place of stones, or among the tombs, but as a little child
playing among the flowers.

The great masters of the Middle Age had set themselves to express in
stone or colour the delicate beauty of the soul, its terror, too, in the
loneliness of the world, where only as it were by chance it might escape
everlasting death. The subtle beauty and pathos of their art has
escaped our eyes filled as they are with the marvellous work of Greece,
unknown till our own time, the splendid and joyful work of the
Renaissance, the mysterious and lovely work of our own day: it remains,
nevertheless, a consummate and exquisite art in its dawn, in its noon,
in its decadence, but it seeks to express something we have forgotten,
and its secret is for the most part altogether hidden from us. It is
from this art, as beautiful in its expression of itself as that of
Greece, that Niccolo Pisano turns away, not to Nature, but to Antiquity.
The movement which followed, producing while it continued almost all
that is to-day gathered in the Bargello, together with much else that is
still happily where it was born, is as it were an appeal from Antiquity
to Life, to Nature. In the simplicity and impulse of this movement, so
spontaneous, so touching, so full of a sense of beauty, which sometimes,
though not often, becomes prettiness, the art of sculpture, awakened at
last from the mystici