Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/80

58 fell in with his peculiar temper and mode of life, his disappointments and hesitations. It was in reality perfect finish. In this way he combines the utmost amount of passion and intensity with the expression of a yielding and flexible life: he gets not vitality merely, but a wonderful force of expression.

Midway between these two systems—the system of the Greek sculptors and the system of Michelangelo—comes the system of Luca della Robbia and the other Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century, partaking both of the Allgemeinheit of the Greeks, their way of extracting certain select elements only in pure form and sacrificing all the others, and the studied incompleteness of Michelangelo, relieving that expression of intensity, passion, energy, which would otherwise have hardened into caricature. Like Michelangelo these sculptors fill their works with intense and individualised expression: their noblest works are the studied sepulchral portraits of particular individuals—the tomb of Conte Ugo in the Abbey of Florence, the tomb of the youthful Medea Colleoni, with the wonderful long throat, in the chapel on the cool north side of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Bergamo; and they unite the element of tranquillity, of repose, to this intense and individualised expression by a system of conventionalism as subtle and skilful as that of the Greeks,