they add a haughty grandeur, by the contrast which their flowing forms and arrogant attitudes present to the severer lines of the construction.  But they are devoid of artistic sincerity, and occupy the same relation to true sculpture as flourishes of rhetoric, however brilliant, to poetry embodying deep thought or passion.  At first sight they impose:  on further acquaintance we find them chiefly interesting as illustrations of a potent civic life upon the wane, gorgeous in its decay.

Sansovino was a first-rate craftsman.  The most finished specimen of his skill is the bronze door of the Sacristy of S. Marco, upon which he is said to have worked through twenty years.  Portraits of the sculptor, Titian, and Pietro Aretino are introduced into the decorative border.  These heads start from the surface of the gate with astonishing vivacity.  That Aretino should thus daily assist in effigy at the procession of priests bearing the sacred emblems from the sacristy to the high altar of S. Mark, is one of the most characteristic proofs of sixteenth-century indifference to things holy and things profane.

Jacopo Sansovino marks the final intrusion of paganism into modern art.  The classical revival had worked but partially and indirectly upon Ghiberti and Donatello—­not because they did not feel it most intensely, but because they clung to nature far more closely than to antique precedent.  This enthusiasm inspired Sansovino with the best and strongest qualities that he can boast; and if his genius had been powerful enough to resist the fascination of merely rhetorical effects, he might have produced a perfect restoration of the classic style.  His was no lifeless or pedantic imitation of antique fragments, but a real expression of the fervour with which the modern world hailed the discoveries revealed to it by scholarship.  This is said advisedly.  The most beautiful and spirited pagan statue of the Renaissance period, justifying the estimate here made of Sansovino’s genius, is the “Bacchus” exhibited in the Bargello Museum.  Both the Bacchus and the Satyriscus at his side are triumphs of realism, irradiated and idealised by the sculptor’s vivid sense of natural gladness.  Considered as a restitution of the antique manner, this statue is decidedly superior to the “Bacchus” of Michael Angelo.  While the mundane splendour of Venice gave body and fulness to Sansovino’s paganism, he missed the self-restraint and purity of taste peculiar to the studious shades of Florence.  In his style, both architectural and sculptural, the neo-pagan sensuality of Italy expanded all its bloom.