This joint creation of Florentine science and Venetian fervour is one of the most precious monuments of the Renaissance.  From it we learn what the men who fought the bloodless battles of the commonwealths, and who aspired to principality, were like.  “He was tall,” writes a biographer of Colleoni,[94] “of erect and well-knit figure, and of well-proportioned limbs.  His complexion tended rather to brown, marked withal by bright and sanguine flesh-tints.  He had black eyes; their brilliancy was vivid, their gaze terrible and penetrating.  In the outline of his nose and in all his features he displayed a manly nobleness combined with goodness and prudence.”  Better phrases cannot be chosen to describe his statue.

While admiring this masterpiece and dwelling on its royal style, we are led to deplore most bitterly the loss of the third equestrian statue of the Renaissance.  Nothing now remains but a few technical studies made by Lionardo da Vinci for his portrait of Francesco Sforza.  The two elaborate models he constructed and the majority of his minute designs have been destroyed.  He intended, we are told, to represent the first Duke of the Sforza dynasty on his charger, trampling the body of a prostrate and just conquered enemy.  Rubens’ transcript from the “Battle of the Standard,” enables us to comprehend to some extent how Lionardo might have treated this motive.  The severe and cautious style of Donatello, after gaining freedom and fervour from Leopardi, was adapted to the ideal presentation of dramatic passion by Lionardo.  Thus Gattamelata, Colleoni, and Francesco Sforza would, through their statues, have marked three distinct phases in the growth of art.  The final effort of Italian sculpture to express human activity in the person of a mounted warrior has perished.  In this sphere we possess nothing which, like the tombs of S. Lorenzo in relation to sepulchral statuary, completes a series of development.

If Donatello founded no school, this was far more the case with Ghiberti.  His supposed pupil, Antonio del Pollajuolo, showed no sign of Ghiberti’s influence, but struck out for himself a style distinguished by almost brutal energy and bizarre realism—­characteristics the very opposite to those of his master.  If the bronze relief of the “Crucifixion” in the Bargello be really Pollajuolo’s, we may even trace a leaning to Verocchio in his manner.  The emphatic passion of the women recalls the group of mourners round the death-bed of Selvaggia Tornabuoni in Verocchio’s celebrated bas-relief.  Pollajuolo, like so many Florentine artists, was a goldsmith, a painter, and a worker in niello, before he took to sculpture.  As a goldsmith he is said to have surpassed all his contemporaries, and his mastery over this art influenced his style in general.  What we chiefly notice, however, in his choice of subjects is a frenzy of murderous enthusiasm, a grimness of imagination, rare among Italian artists.  The picture in the Uffizzi of “Hercules and Antaeus”