RENAISSANCE SCULPTURE In Italy in the 15th century the growth of the scientific spirit, expressing itself in research and experiment, led to a renewed interest in classic sculpture. This sculpture, which was that of Latium rather than of Greece, revealed itself at first as little more than a new and more perfect realism than had been achieved by the Gothic carver. It offered besides a system of chiselled orna ments which comprised new and exquisite motives for the em bellishment of architecture. Especially in the modelling of the nude figure and in the design and rendering of draperies the ancient statues embody a technique which seemed to the Italian sculptor the perfection of representational art. The Pisan sculptors, Nicolo d'Apulia and Giovanni Pisano, were among the first to restore to the figures of Christ and His Mother, and to scenes from the Bible, the proportions, attitudes, and accessories of the figures on Roman sarcophagi, and their example was widely imitated throughout Italy.
As men turned with growing enthusiasm to the study of the ancient civilizations a broader appreciation of antique sculpture followed. Beyond its exquisite imitation of nature, artists per ceived the idealization, or interpretation, of nature. The Italian sculptor awoke to the breadth and dignity, the monumental beauty, which his own decorative and narrative art had lost. An tique art, which had revealed to him the beauty of the human body, revealed also the beauty of structural law, of the geometry of mass and shadow, and taught him to seize those subtle relation ships in the world of form which architecture abstractly expresses. The concise monumental style of Giotto—a painter with a sculptor's mind—first exhibited this broader aspect of classic art.
Lorenzo Ghiberti expresses in his nudes, in his gracious draperies, in the restraint and dignity of his pictorial reliefs, some understanding of the new ideal. Donatello (1385 1466) illustrates to us all the stages by which the antique re vealed itself. The uncompromising realism of his first work, his delight in genre types, in the rendering of muscles, harsh features, and textures, is gradually penetrated by the ennobling influence of the antique. Roman motives such as dancing children and the
nude, enter his art together with that ideal and generalized beauty and the monumental harmonies that Rome teaches him. Human beauty and human dignity become the themes of this art. Thought, rather than sentiment, is the quality that shines through it. His bronze David, in the Bargello, Florence ; his Judith, also in Florence ; and his Gattamalata, in Verona, are superb examples of that balance which he achieved between actual and abstract harmonies.
Antonio Pollaiuolo (1432-1498) and Andrea del Verrochio (1435-1488) were realists whose energetic work shows much less the influence of the classics. The Herakles and Antaeus, in the Bargello, Florence, by Pollaiuolo, shows this artist's interest in movement and in anatomy, and the fine Colleoni Monument, in Venice, by Verrochio is a superb embodiment of energy and power.
Luca della Robbia (1399-1482) and Andrea della Robbia L525) were decorators whose lovely ornament and devotional sentiment are often touched with antique serenity. Mina da Fiesole (1431-1484) and Desiderio da Settignano (1428-1464) were also decorators to whose gracious styles the classic motives were most congenial.
All of these were Florentines, but the new in sculp ture was not confined to Florence. The Venetian sculptor Antonio Rizzo (died 1499), although essentially mediaeval, exemplifies in his nudes and his draperies a growing understanding of the classic spirit. In Venice also the Lombardi (Pietro and his sons Antonio and Tullio) developed an exquisite style of Renaissance ornament, which was, in technique at least, equalled by the work of Giovanni Antonio Amadeo (1447-1522) and his assist ants at the Certosa of Pavia. The greatest sculptor, outside of Florence, was Jacopo della Quercia (1373-1438), a master of the nude, whose fine reliefs, set about the portals of San Petronio, in Bologna, anticipate in their energy the later figures of Michelangelo.