art from degradation, and connected a similar enthusiasm for corporeal beauty with the thoughts and aspirations of the Hellenic race.  The Italians lacked this safeguard of a natural religion.  To throw the Christian ideal aside, and to strive to grasp the classical ideal in exchange, was easy.  But paganism alone could give them nothing but its vices; it was incapable of communicating its real source of life—­its poetry, its faith, its cult of nature.  Art, therefore, as soon as the artists pronounced themselves for sensuality, merged in a skilful selection and reproduction of elegant forms, and nothing more.  A handsome youth upon a pedestal was called a god.  A duke’s mistress on Titian’s canvas passed for Aphrodite.  Andrea del Sarto’s faithless wife figured as Madonna.  Cellini himself, though sensitive to every kind of physical beauty—­as we gather from what he tells us of Cencio, Diego, Faustina, Paolino, Angelica, Ascanio—­has not attempted to animate his “Perseus,” or his “Ganymede,” or his “Diana of Fontainebleau,” with a vestige of intellectual or moral loveliness.  The vacancy of their expression proves the degradation of an art that had ceased to idealise anything beyond a faultless body.  Not thus did the Greeks imagine even their most sensual divinities.  There is at least a thought in Faun and Satyr.  Cellini’s statues have no thought; their blank animalism corresponds to the condition of their maker’s soul.[359]

When Rome was carried by assault in 1527, and the Papal Court was besieged in the castle of S. Angelo, Cellini played the part of bombardier.  It is well known that he claims to have shot the Constable of Bourbon dead with his own hand, and to have wounded the Prince of Orange; nor does there seem to be any adequate reason for discrediting his narrative.  It is certain that he was an expert marksman, and that he did Clement good service by directing the artillery of S. Angelo.  If we believed all his assertions, however, we should have to suppose that nothing memorable happened without his intervention.  In his own eyes his whole life was a miracle.  The very hailstones that fell upon his head could not be grasped in both hands.  His guns and powder brought down birds no other marksman had a chance of hitting.  When he was a child, he grasped a scorpion without injury, and saw a salamander “living and enjoying himself in the hottest flames.”  After his fever at Rome in 1535, he threw off from his stomach a hideous worm—­hairy, speckled with green, black, and red—­the like whereof the doctors never saw.[360] When he finally escaped from the dungeons of S. Angelo in 1539, a luminous appearance like an aureole settled on his head, and stayed there for the rest of his life.[361] These facts are related in the true spirit of Jerome Cardan, Paracelsus, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Sir Thomas Browne.  Cellini doubtless believed in them; but they warn us to be cautious in accepting what he says about his exploits, since imagination and self-conceit could so far distort his judgment.