e age sculpture, is thus introduced:--

* * *

"Niccola's peculiar praise is this,--that, in practice at least, if not
in theory, he first established the principle that the study of nature,
corrected by the ideal of the antique, and animated by the spirit of
Christianity, personal and social, can alone lead to excellence in
art:--each of the three elements of human nature--Matter, Mind, and
Spirit--being thus brought into union and co-operation in the service of
God, in due relative harmony and subordination. I cannot over-estimate
the importance of this principle; it was on this that, consciously or
unconsciously, Niccola himself worked--it has been by following it that
Donatello and Ghiberti, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michael Angelo have
risen to glory. The Sienese school and the Florentine, minds
contemplative and dramatic, are alike beholden to it for whatever
success has attended their efforts. Like a treble-stranded rope, it
drags after it the triumphal car of Christian Art. But if either of the
strands be broken, if either of the three elements be pursued
disjointedly from the other two, the result is, in each respective case,
grossness, pedantry, or weakness:--the exclusive imitation of Nature
produces a Caravaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt--that of the Antique, a
Pellegrino di Tibaldo and a David; and though there be a native chastity
and taste in religion, which restrains those who worship it too
abstractedly from Intellect and Sense, from running into such extremes,
it cannot at least supply that mechanical apparatus which will enable
them to soar:--such devotees must be content to gaze up into heaven,
like angels cropt of their wings."--Vol. ii., p. 102-3.

* * *

48. This is mere Bolognese eclecticism in other terms, and those terms
incorrect. We are amazed to find a writer usually thoughtful, if not
accurate, thus indolently adopting the worn-out falsities of our weakest
writers on Taste. Does he--can he for an instant suppose that the
ruffian Caravaggio, distinguished only by his preference of candlelight
and black shadows for the illustration and re-enforcement of villainy,
painted nature--mere nature--exclusive nature, more painfully or
heartily than John Bellini or Raphael? Does he not see that whatever men
imitate must be nature of some kind, material nature or spiritual,
lovely or foul, brutal or human, but nature still? Does he himself see
in mere, external, copy