To do more than briefly mention the minor sculptors of this group would be impossible.  Mino di Giovanni, called Da Fiesole, was characterised by grace that tended to degenerate into formality.  The tombs in the Abbey of Florence have an almost infantine sweetness of style, which might be extremely piquant, were it not that Mino pushed this quality in other works to the verge of mannerism.[104] Their architectural features are the same as those of similar monuments in Tuscany:—­a shallow recess, flanked by Renaissance pilasters, and roofed with a semicircular arch; within the recess, the full-length figure of the dead man on a marble coffin of antique design; in the lunette above, a Madonna carved in low relief.[105] Mino’s bust of Bishop Salutati in the cathedral church of Fiesole is a powerful portrait, no less distinguished for vigorous individuality than consummate workmanship.  The waxlike finish of the finely chiselled marble alone betrays that delicacy which with Mino verged on insipidity.  The same faculty of character delineation is seen in three profiles, now in the Bargello Museum, attributed to Mino.  They represent Frederick Duke of Urbino, Battista Sforza, and Galeazzo Sforza.  The relief is very low, rising at no point more than half an inch above the surface of the ground, but so carefully modulated as to present a wonderful variety of light and shade, and to render the facial expression with great vividness.

Desiderio da Settignano, one of Donatello’s few scholars, was endowed with the same gift of exquisite taste as his friend Mino da Fiesole;[106] but his inventive faculty was bolder, and his genius more robust, in spite of the profuse ornamentation and elaborate finish of his masterpiece, the tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce.  The bust he made of Marietta di Palla degli Strozzi enables us to compare his style in portraiture with that of Mino.[107] It would be hard to find elsewhere a more captivating combination of womanly sweetness and dignity.  We feel, in looking at these products of the best age of Italian sculpture, that the artists who conceived them were, in the truest sense of the word, gentle.  None but men courteous and unaffected could have carved a face like that of Marietta Strozzi, breathing the very spirit of urbanity.  To express the most amiable qualities of a living person in a work of art that should suggest emotional tranquillity by harmonious treatment, and indicate the temperance of a disciplined nature by self-restraint and moderation of style, and to do this with the highest technical perfection, was the triumph of fifteenth-century sculpture.