The list of fifteenth-century sculptors is almost ended; and already, on the threshold of the sixteenth, stands the mighty form of Michael Angelo.  Andrea Contucci da Sansavino and his pupil Jacopo Tatti, called also Sansovino, after his master, must, however, next be mentioned as continuing the Florentine tradition without subservience to the style of Buonarroti.  Andrea da Sansavino was a sculptor in whom for the first time the faults of the mid-Renaissance period are glaringly apparent.  He persistently sacrificed simplicity of composition to decorative ostentation, and tranquillity of feeling to theatrical effect.  The truth of this will be acknowledged by all who have studied the tombs of the cardinals in S. Maria del Popolo already mentioned,[115] and the bas-reliefs upon the Santa Casa at Loreto.  In technical workmanship Andrea proved himself an able craftsman, modelling marble with the plasticity of wax, and lavishing patterns of the most refined invention.  Yet the decorative prodigality of this master corresponded to the frigid and stylistic graces of the neo-Latin poets.  It was so much mannerism—­adopted without real passion from the antique, and applied with a rhetorical intention.  Those acanthus scrolls and honeysuckle borders, in spite of their consummate finish, fail to arrest attention, leaving the soul as unstirred as the Ovidian cadences of Bembo.

Jacopo Tatti was a genius of more distinction.  Together with San Gallo and Bramante he studied the science of architecture in Rome, where he also worked at the restoration of newly discovered antiques, and cast in bronze a copy of the “Laocoon.”  Thus equipped with the artistic learning of his age, he was called in 1523 by the Doge, Andrea Gritti, to Venice.  The material pomp of Venice at this epoch, and the pride of her unrivalled luxury, affected his imagination so powerfully that his genius, tutored by Florentine and Umbrian masters among the ruins of old Rome, became at once Venetian.  In the history of the Renaissance the names of Titian and Aretino, themselves acclimatised aliens, are inseparably connected with that of their friend Sansovino.  At Venice he lived until his death in 1570, building the Zecca, the Library, the Scala d’Oro in the Ducal Palace, and the Loggietta beneath the bell-tower of S. Mark.  In all his work he subordinated sculpture to architecture, and his statuary is conceived in the bravura, manner of Renaissance paganism.  Whatever may be the faults of Sansovino in both arts, it cannot be denied that he expressed, in a style peculiar to himself, the large voluptuous external life of Venice at a moment when this city was the Paris or the Corinth of Renaissance Europe.  At the same time, the shallowness of Sansovino’s inspiration as a sculptor is patent in his masterpieces of parade—­the “Neptune” and the “Mars,” guarding the Scala d’Oro.  Separated from the architecture of the court and staircase, they are insignificant in spite of their colossal scale.  In their place