Our study of three centuries has therefore brought us to the following conclusion. After centuries of effacement and years of struggle, the art of sculpture has once more discovered the possibility of natural expression. But it is still hampered by its ancient alliance with sacerdotalism. This must be abandoned, and the sculptor must devote himself wholly and freely to Mother Nature, and Mother Nature’s most magnificent achievement—the human form. By no other means can a standard approaching the Hellenic be reached. We are now to learn how the bonds fashioned by the Roman Church were shaken off by the Italian sculptors of the fifteenth century. CHAPTER IX THE RISE OF NATURALISM—LORENZO GHIBERTI, DONATELLO, VEROCCHIO, ETC. (1400-1500 A.D.) It will be remembered that the rise of Greek sculpture was a matter of fifty or, at the most, seventy years. The Muse of the art did not spring fully grown from the head of Apollo, it is true. But within half a century the Greek craftsman realized the possibilities of his materials; he discovered what subjects could be treated most properly, and fitted himself to express the profoundest thoughts and emotions of his countrymen. The result was Phidias and the Parthenon. Yet by 1400 A.D. we have by no means reached the zenith of Italian sculpture. In other words, after tracing the growth of the art for a century we find that another hundred years is necessary before an Italian Parthenon is possible. To what was the slower evolution of sculpture in Italy due? It might be suggested that marble and bronze were not the fittest media to embody the teeming experience of fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Italy. This is probably true. Seeing, however, that the sister art of painting had lagged behind in similar fashion, we must trace the deliberate growth of Italian sculpture to the lesser intensity of the energizing force. The Italians were not stirred to the depths by one heart-searching struggle like that between the Persians and the Hellenes. The contention between city and city was, however, incessant. Within the town walls, too, the strife between class and class was constant. Apart, therefore, from the question of degree, we find in the Italian city-states between 1350 and 1400 A.D. the same restless vortices of intellectual and emotional energy which were the first consequences of Marathon and Salamis.