of all arts and sciences alternating with half-bestial shapes of satyrs and sea-children:—­such are the forms which fill the spaces of the chapel walls, and climb the pilasters, and fret the arches, in such abundance that had the whole church been finished as it was designed, it would have presented one splendid though bizarre effect of incrustation.  Heavy screens of Verona marble, emblazoned in open arabesques with the ciphers of Sigismondo and Isotta, with coats-of-arms, emblems, and medallion portraits, shut the chapels from the nave.  Who produced all this sculpture it is difficult to say.  Some of it is very good:  much is indifferent.  We may hazard the opinion that, besides Bernardo Ciuffagni, of whom Vasari speaks, some pupils of Donatello and Benedetto da Majano worked at it.  The influence of the sculptors of Florence is everywhere perceptible.

Whatever be the merit of these reliefs, there is no doubt that they fairly represent one of the most interesting moments in the history of modern art.  Gothic inspiration had failed; the early Tuscan style of the Pisani had been worked out; Michelangelo was yet far distant, and the abundance of classic models had not overwhelmed originality.  The sculptors of the school of Ghiberti and Donatello, who are represented in this church, were essentially pictorial, preferring low to high relief, and relief in general to detached figures.  Their style, like the style of Boiardo in poetry, of Botticelli in painting, is specific to Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century.  Mediaeval standards of taste were giving way to classical, Christian sentiment to Pagan; yet the imitation of the antique had not been carried so far as to efface the spontaneity of the artist, and enough remained of Christian feeling to tinge the fancy with a grave and sweet romance.  The sculptor had the skill and mastery to express his slightest shade of thought with freedom, spirit, and precision.  Yet his work showed no sign of conventionality, no adherence to prescribed rules.  Every outline, every fold of drapery, every attitude was pregnant, to the artist’s own mind at any rate, with meaning.  In spite of its symbolism, what he wrought was never mechanically figurative, but gifted with the independence of its own beauty, vital with an inbreathed spirit of life.  It was a happy moment, when art had reached consciousness, and the artist had not yet become self-conscious.  The hand and the brain then really worked together for the procreation of new forms of grace, not for the repetition of old models, or for the invention of the strange and startling.  ’Delicate, sweet, and captivating,’ are good adjectives to express the effect produced upon the mind by the contemplation even of the average work of this period.