Maestro Marzio Pandolfi was a skilled workman and an artist.  He was one of the last of those workers in metals who once sent their masterpieces from Rome to the great cathedrals of the world; one of the last of the artistic descendants of Caradosso, of Benvenuto Cellini, of Claude Ballin, and of all their successors; one of those men of rare talent who unite the imagination of the artist with the executive skill of the practised workman.  They are hard to find nowadays.  Of all the twenty chisellers of various ages who hammered from morning till night in the rooms outside, one only—­Gianbattista Bordogni—­had been thought worthy by his master to share the privacy of the inner studio.  The lad had talent, said Maestro Marzio, and, what was more, the lad had ideas—­ideas about life, about the future of Italy, about the future of the world’s society.  Marzio found in him a pupil, an artist and a follower of his own political creed.

It was a small room in which they worked together.  Plain wooden shelves lined two of the walls from the floor to the ceiling.  The third was occupied by tables and a door, and in the fourth high grated windows were situated, from which the clear light fell upon the long bench before which the two men sat upon high stools.  Upon the shelves were numerous models in red wax, of chalices, monstrances, marvellous ewers and embossed basins for the ablution of the priests’ hands, crucifixes, crowns, palm and olive branches—­in a word, models of all those things which pertain to the service and decoration of the church, and upon which it has been the privilege of the silversmith to expend his art and labour from time immemorial until the present day.  There were some few casts in plaster, but almost all were of that deep red, strong-smelling wax which is the most fit medium for the temporary expression and study of very fine and intricate designs.  There is something in the very colour which, to one acquainted with the art, suggests beautiful fancies.  It is the red of the Pompeian walls, and the rich tint seems to call up the matchless traceries of the ancients.  Old chisellers say that no one can model anything wholly bad in red wax, and there is truth in the saying.  The material is old—­the older the better; it has passed under the hand of the artist again and again; it has taken form, served for the model of a lasting work, been kneaded together in a lump, been worked over and over by the boxwood tool.  The workman feels that it has absorbed some of the qualities of the master’s genius, and touches it with the certainty that its stiff substance will yield new forms of beauty in his fingers, rendering up some of its latent capacity of shape at each pressure and twist of the deftly-handled instrument.