Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/28

Rh ever lived since the days of the ancients. But since your Excellence encourages my model with such praise, I feel the heart to execute it at least thrice as well in bronze." Precisely—he had the heart, but that was not enough. For his readiness to apprehend the true stature of a Michael Angelo, a Donatello or a Leonardo he is to be honoured, especially as the taste of his contemporaries, while still impressed with a sense of Michael Angelo's grandeur, steadily drifted, all through the sixteenth century, toward such types as Bandinelli, Ammanati, John of Bologna and the like, as though the stars in their courses were fighting to prepare the way for the seventeenth-century poseur, Bernini. But Cellini's superior judgment was not matched by his abilities, and even in his admirations he was not always as fortunate as he was enlightened. There is a kind of tragic irony in the enthusiasm that swept him to the feet of Michael Angelo, who, breathing the airs of an apocalyptic world, was just the mighty exemplar for a delicate craftsman like Cellini to avoid.

That is what, as an artist, Cellini was, a delicate craftsman, with one great difference between himself and those fifteenth-century masters with whom, as I have indicated, art and craftsmanship were often made one and the same thing. He could not give to his work, even at its finest, that exquisiteness in grain, that subtle beauty of surface, that haunting personal note, which the earlier men achieved simply because, as it seems to me, their whole natures, their