Michel Colombe, the pupil of Claux and Anthoniet and the sculptor of the monument of Francois II., Duke of Brittany, at Nantes, the relief of “St. George and the Dragon” for the Chateau of Gaillon, now in the Louvre, and the Fontaine de Beaune, at Tours, and Jean Juste, whose noble masterpiece, the Tomb of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany, is the finest ornament of the Cathedral of St. Denis, bridge the distance and mark the transition to Goujon, Cousin, and Germain Pilon far more suavely than the school of Fontainebleau did the change from that of Tours to Poussin.  Cousin, though the monument of Admiral Chabot is a truly marvellous work, witnessing a practical sculptor’s hand, is really to be classed among painters.  And Germain Pilon’s compromise with Italian decorativeness, graceful and fertile sculptor as his many works show him to have been, resulted in a lack of personal force that has caused him to be thought on the one hand “seriously injured by the bastard sentiment proper to the school of Fontainebleau,” as Mrs. Pattison somewhat sternly remarks, and on the other to be reprehended by Germain Brice in 1718, for evincing quelque reste du gout gothique—­some reminiscence of Gothic taste.  Jean Goujon is really the first modern French sculptor.

II

He remains, too, one of the very finest, even in a competition constantly growing more exacting since his day.  He had a very particular talent, and it was exhibited in manifold ways.  He is as fine in relief as in the round.  His decorative quality is as eminent as his purely sculptural side.  Compared with his Italian contemporaries he is at once full of feeling and severe.  He has nothing of Pilon’s chameleon-like imitativeness.  He does not, on the other hand, break with the traditions of the best models known to him—­and, undoubtedly he knew the best.  His works cover and line the Louvre, and anyone who visits Paris may get a perfect conception of his genius—­certainly anyone who in addition visits Rouen and beholds the lovely tracery of his earliest sculpture on the portal of St. Maclou.  He was eminently the sculptor of an educated class, and appealed to a cultivated appreciation.  Coming as he did at the acme of the French Renaissance, when France was borrowing with intelligent selection whatever it considered valuable from Italy, he pleased the dilettanti.  There is something distinctly “swell” in his work.  He does not perhaps express any overmastering personal feeling, nor does he stamp the impress of French national character on his work with any particular emphasis.  He is too well-bred and too cultivated, he has too much aplomb.  But his works show both more personal feeling and more national character than the works of his contemporaries elsewhere.  For line he has a very intimate instinct, and of mass, in the sculptor’s as well as the painter’s sense, he has a native comprehension.  Compare his “Diana”