opinion.  Brunelleschi adhered to the style and taste of the fifteenth century at its commencement; but the too fervid quality of his character impaired his work as a sculptor.  Ghiberti, on the other hand, translated the calm of his harmonious nature into his composition.  The angel leans from heaven and points to the ram, which is seated quietly and out of sight of the main actors.  Isaac kneels in the attitude of a submissive victim, though his head is turned aside, as if attracted by the rush of pinions through the air; while Abraham has but just lifted his hand, and the sacrifice is only suggested as a possibility by the naked knife.  The two servants are grouped below in conversation, one on each side of the browsing ass.  This power of telling a story plainly, but without dramatic vehemence; of eliminating the painful details of the subject, and combining its chief motives into one agreeable whole, gave peculiar charm to Ghiberti’s manner.  It marked him as an artist distinguished by good taste.

How Delia Quercia treated the “Sacrifice of Isaac” we do not know.  His bas-reliefs upon the facade of S. Petronio at Bologna, and round the font of S. John’s Chapel in the cathedral of Siena, enable us, however, to compare his style with that of Ghiberti in the handling of a subject common to both, the “Creation of Eve."[82] There is no doubt but that Della Quercia was a formidable rival.  Had the gates of the Baptistery been entrusted to his execution, we might have possessed a masterpiece of more heroic style.  While smoothness and an almost voluptuous suavity of outline distinguish Ghiberti’s naked Eve, gliding upheld by angels from the side of Adam at her Maker’s bidding, Della Quercia’s group, by the concentration of robust and rugged power, anticipates the style of Michael Angelo.  Ghiberti treats the subject pictorially, placing his figures in a landscape, and lavishing attendant angels.  Della Quercia, in obedience to the stricter laws of sculpture, restrains his composition to the three chief persons, and brings them into close connection.  While Adam reclines asleep in a beautiful and highly studied attitude, Eve has just stepped forth behind him, and God stands robed in massive drapery, raising His hand as though to draw her into life.  There is, perhaps, an excess of dramatic action in the lifted right leg of Eve, and too much of pantomimic language in the expressive hands of Eve and her Creator.  The robe, again, in its voluminous and snaky coils, and the triangular nimbus of the Deity, convey an effect of heaviness rather than of majesty.  Yet we feel, while studying this composition, that it is a noble and original attempt, falling but little short of supreme accomplishment.  Without this antecedent sketch, Michael Angelo might not have matured the most complete of all his designs in the Sistine Chapel.  The similarity between Delia Quercia’s bas-relief and Buonarroti’s fresco of Eve is incontestable.  The young Florentine, while an exile in Bologna, and engaged upon the shrine of S. Dominic, must have spent hours of study before the sculptures of S. Petronio; so that this seed of Della Quercia’s sowing bore after many years the fruit of world-renowned achievement in Rome.