Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/24

Rh or Jacopo della Quercia's Fonte Gaia at Siena, succeeded by triumphs of pure craftsmanship like the pulpit at Prato which Donatello and Michelozzo did together, or like any of those countless sepulchral monuments of which Desiderio's tomb for Cardinal Marsuppini, in Santa Croce, is perhaps the most conclusive type. Verrocchio, with the power in him to do a thing like the Colleoni at Venice, approaches with the same creative ardour, the same impassioned feeling for beauty, not only that heroic equestrian statue, but the Medici tomb in the sacristy of San Lorenzo at Florence, a tomb of wholly formal decoration. The point of view is in each case the same. "Make the work beautiful," he says, "no matter what its form may be." He makes it so, and incidentally he helps to establish a tradition. The spirit of the man of genius was shared, in a measure, even by the mediocrity, and as you look over the whole mass of Renaissance work in stone, metal, or, for that matter, any material, you are struck by the way in which craftsmanship is raised to a higher power. A certain largeness of feeling is in the air, and a lantern wrought by some Florentine to-day unknown, a setting given to a jewel at a shop whose proprietor, even in his lifetime, never had any celebrity whatever, bears the same stamp that you find on the noblest productions of the era. Why was that stamp not recaptured by Cellini? He had the sincerity of his predecessors, and their zeal. What he lacked was that something, next to impossible to define, which seems more the property of an