the S. Eligius with its beautiful drapery, a little stupid still, or
sleepy is it, with the mystery of the Middle Age that after all was but
just passing away. Something of this sleepiness seems also to have
overtaken the St. Luke, that tired figure in the Duomo; and so it is
with a real surprise that we come at last upon the best work of Nanni's
life, "the first great living composition of the Renaissances," as
Burckhardt says, the Madonna della Cintola over Niccolo d'Arezzo's door
of the Duomo. Even with all the work of Ghiberti, of Donatello even, to
choose from, that relief of Madonna in an almond-shaped glory,
stretching out her hands among the cherubim, with a gesture so eager and
so moving to St. Thomas, who kneels before her, remains one of the most
beautiful works of that age, and one of the loveliest in all Tuscany.

There follows Ciuffagni (1381-1457), that poor sculptor working in his
old age amid much that was splendid and strange at Rimini, where Lorenzo
Ghiberti (1378-1455) had painted in his youth. For all his genius,
Ghiberti, that euphuist, did not influence those who came after him as
Donatello did. His work, inspired by the past, by Andrea Pisano, for
instance, is full of the lost beauty of the Middle Age, the old secrets
of the Gothic manner. His solution of the problem before him, a problem
of movement, of character, of life, is to make the relief as purely
picturesque as possible; with him sculpture almost passes into painting,
using not without charm the perspective of a picture the mere seeming of
just that, but losing how profoundly, much of the nobility, the delight
of pure form, the genius peculiar to sculpture. As an artist pure and
simple, as a master of composition, he may well have no superior, for
the fantasy and beauty of his work, its complexity, too, are almost
unique, and entirely his own; but in simplicity, and in a certain sense
of reality, he is wanting, so that however delightful his work may be,
those "gates of Paradise," for instance, that Michelangelo praised, it
seems to be complete in itself, to suggest nothing but the wonderful
effect one may get by using the means proper to one art for expression
in another, as though one were to write a book that should have the
effect upon one of an opera, to allow the strange rhythm and sensuous
beauty of Tristan and Isolde, for instance, to disengage itself from
pages which were full of just musical words.

Ghiberti's gift for composi