Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/23

Rh fixed status was impelled by all the influences of the period to make the independence and the importance of his chosen branch a point of honour. It was a time of intense personal pride. Yet it was a time, too, of extraordinary give and take in the arts. The architect and the sculptor, for example, met one another halfway. It is significant that in the very dawn of plastic art in Italy it is an entirely utilitarian project that stirs creative genius to activity. It is as an architect, no less than as a sculptor, that Niccola Pisano undertakes to construct the hexagonal pulpit for the baptistery at Pisa, and it would be difficult to say where the architect leaves off and the sculptor begins in the transformation of this tribune, made for a practical purpose, into an essentially decorative object. In other words, when the journeyman stone-carver subsides into the background and the sculptor—which is to say the stone-carver of individual genius—takes his place, the change is effected amid conditions which keep sculpture a craft as well as an art; and this situation endures for generations, modified in many ways as different types of personal force arise, but true, in the main, to the broad instinct at which we have just glanced. That instinct was a sound one. The man of the Renaissance knew that art embraced not only the greater but the lesser, and that it was as much worth his while, when the chance offered, to do an ordinary bit of craftsmanship as to produce some elaborate tour de force. Thus you find the pulpits of the Pisani, their Fonte Maggiore at Perugia,