cquired a competence, of this work too he seems to have
tired, devoting himself to architectural work--porticos, altars, and
such--buying an estate at last outside the gate of Prato that is towards
Florence; dying in 1497.

It is with a prolific master, Mino da Fiesole, the last pupil, according
to Vasari, of Desiderio da Settignano, that the delicate and flower-like
work of the Tuscan sculptors may be said to pass into a still lovely
decadence. His facile work is found all over Italy. The three busts of
the Bargello are among his earliest and best works--the Piero de'
Medici, the Giuliano de' Medici, and the small bust of Rinaldo della
Luna. There, too, are two reliefs from his hand, and some tabernacles
which have no great merit. A relief of the Madonna and Child is a finer
achievement in his earlier manner, and in the Duomo of Fiesole there
remains a bust of the Bishop, Leonardo Salutati, while in the same
chapel, an altar and relief, from his hand, seem to prove that it was
only a fatal facility that prevented him from becoming as fine an artist
as Benedetto da Maiano.

With Andrea Sansovino, born in 1460, we come to the art of the sixteenth
century, very noble and beautiful, at any rate in its beginning, but so
soon to pass into a mere affectation. The pupil, according to Vasari, of
Antonio Pollaiuolo, Sansovino's work is best seen in Rome. Here in
Florence he made in his youth the altar of the Blessed Sacrament in the
left transept of S. Spirito, and in 1502 the Baptism of Christ, over the
eastern gates of the Baptistery, but this was finished by another hand.
And there followed him Benedetto da Rovezzano, whose style has become
classical, the sculptor of every sort of lovely furniture,--mantelpieces,
tabernacles, and such,--yet in his beautiful reliefs of the life of
S. Giovanni Gualberto you see the work of the sixteenth century at its
best, without the freshness and delicate charm of fifteenth-century
sculpture, but exquisite enough in its perfect skill, its real
achievement.

There follows Michelangelo (1475-1564). It is with a sort of surprise
one comes face to face with that sorrowful, heroic figure, as though,
following among the flowers, we had come upon some tragic precipice,
some immense cavern too deep for sight. How, after the delight, the
delicate charm of the fifteenth century, can I speak of this beautiful,
strong, and tragic soul? It might almost seem that the greatest Italian
of the sixteenth c