Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/106

Rh performances of Vasari, the cold and vacuous paintings of Bronzino, reveal even a lower spiritual vitality. The lamp of plastic art had burned low in Italy.

When Cellini left the sphere of jewellery and goldsmith's work, that emptiness of emotional and moral intention on which I have been dwelling became even more apparent. It was during his second visit to France, in the year 1543, that he aspired to be a sculptor in the strict sense of the word. At Paris he began to cast statues on a large scale in bronze, and to design colossal works combining statuary and architecture. Of the clay models for the fountain at Fontainebleau, with its gigantic Mars, so minutely described in his autobiography, nothing, so far as I am aware, is now extant. But we still possess the Nymph, which was transferred from Fontainebleau by Henry II. to Diane de Poitier's country-seat at Anet, and thence removed to the galleries of the Louvre, where it may now be seen. The defects of this recumbent figure are obvious. Though it might pass muster on a candlestick, the model, expanded to something over life-size, reveals a fatal want of meaning. The vacant features, the defective physical structure, and the inert pose of this nude woman are not compensated by the success of Benvenuto's casting, which is indeed remarkable. All the bad points of the later Florentine school appear here—a preposterous elongation of the body, an affected attenuation of the joints and extremities, and a complete absence of expression.