d the syllables of eternity, and in its agony of longing
or sorrow has failed to speak only the word love. All things particular
to the individual, all that is small or of little account, that endures
but for a moment, have been purged away, so that Life itself may make,
as it were, an immortal gesticulation, almost monstrous in its
passionate intensity--a mirage seen on the mountains, a shadow on the
snow. And after him, and long before his death, there came Baccio
Bandinelli and the rest, Cellini the goldsmith, Giovanni da Bologna, and
the sculptors of the decadence that has lasted till our own day. With
him Italian art seems to have been hurled out of heaven; henceforth his
followers stand on the brink of Pandemonium, making the frantic gestures
of fallen gods.

[Illustration: "LA NOTTE"

_From Tomb of Giulinto de' Medici. Michelangelo_

_Anderson_]

FOOTNOTES:

[115] It seems necessary to note that probably Arnolfo Fiorentino and
Arnolfo di Cambio are not the same person. Cf. Crowe and Cavalcaselle,
_op. cit._ vol. i. p. 127, note 4.

[116] Eccellenza della Statua di S. Giorgio di Donatello: Marescotti,
1684.

XXII. FLORENCE

ACCADEMIA

Florentine art, that had expressed itself so charmingly, and at last so
passionately and profoundly, in sculpture, where design, drawing, that
integrity of the plastic artist, is everything, and colour almost
nothing at all, shows itself in painting, where it is most
characteristic, either as the work of those who were sculptors
themselves, or had at least learned from them--Giotto, Orcagna,
Masaccio, the Pollaiuoli, Verrocchio, and Michelangelo--or in such work
as that of Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, and Leonardo,
where painting seems to pass into poetry, into a canticle or a hymn, a
Trionfo or some strange, far-away, sweet music. The whole impulse of
this art lies in the intellect rather than in the senses, is busied
continually in discussing life rather than in creating it, in discussing
one by one the secrets of movement, of expression; always more eager to
find new forms for ideas than to create just life itself in all its
splendour and shadow, as Venice was content to do. Thus, while Florence
was the most influential school of art in Italy, her greatest sons do
not seem altogether to belong to her: Leonardo, a wanderer all his life,
founds his school in Milan, and dies at last in France; Michelangelo
becomes almost a Roman painter, the sculpto