Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/29

Rh very souls, were in harmony with the tremendous inspiration prevailing in the life about them. Pisanello can give one of his portrait medals the massive dignity of an antique sculpture or of a painting by Mantegna. Verrocchio, making the Medici tomb of San Lorenzo, has some magic in his fingers which saturates in beauty the simple leafage of bronze with which he embellishes the porphyry sarcophagus, and that touch of his performs the same mysterious office for the network of bronze rope that fills up the rest of the opening in the design. Cellini could not have made one of those medals, he could not have made that net of twisted rope, though his life had depended on it. It was his genius, instead, to be supremely clever. Read the pages in which he tells how to do filigree work, how to set an emerald or to tint a diamond, how to make a seal or a medal, and you can almost catch the flash of the shrewd eye, you can almost hear the self-confident, dogmatic voice as it exposes to you some of the secrets of the trade. He was the Rue de la Paix in excelsis, an inspired shop-keeper, not an inspired artist. He could do anything he liked—with his hands. It was when qualities less ponderable were needed that he was at a disadvantage. Intellect, spirituality, fine feeling, these are the resources that he lacked as an artist. When he produces the famous salt-cellar for Francis I., now at Vienna, he makes the first stage of the work an affair of reasonably just proportions, but then he models the figures in the round on too large a scale, and