Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/105

Rh luxuriance than any of the higher intellectual gifts. The man, as he stands revealed in his autobiography, was lacking in reserve, in delicacy, in fineness of emotion, in what the Germans call Innigkeit, in elevation of soul and imaginative purity. The very qualities which render his life-history dramatic prove the externality of his nature, the violence and almost coarseness of his temperament, the absence of poetry, reflection, reverie, and spiritual atmosphere in his whole being. We are not, therefore, surprised to find that his artistic work, in spite of its prodigious skill, fecundity of invention, energy, and thoroughness of execution, is deficient in depth, deficient in sweetness, deficient in true dignity and harmony, deficient in those suggestive beauties which inspire a dream and waken sympathy in the beholder.

Shortcomings of this kind in the moral and intellectual elements of art were not peculiar to Cellini. They mark nearly the whole productions of his epoch. Only at Venice did the really grand style survive in the painting of Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto. Michel Angelo indeed was yet alive in 1543, the year when Benvenuto essayed works on a large scale in sculpture; but Michel Angelo's greatest achievements belonged to the past. Giulio Romano retained something of the sacred fire which animated his master Raphael's pictures. His vigorous but coarse and soulless frescoes may be properly compared with Cellini's statuary. Meanwhile, the marbles of Bandinelli and Ammanati, the manneristic productions of Montelupo and Montorsoli, the