Nor was this all. Not only were the circumstances less favourable but the artists themselves were unfitted for the accomplishment of the greatest tasks. The age, not the earthly parent, is the real father of the man. Lesser spirits attempted to wield a giant’s tools and struggled with themes which Michael Angelo oftentimes failed to make articulate. They sought to obtain his sublime effects by insistence upon such accidents of his style as the exaggerated muscular development or contorted poses of his figures. Immense monuments, suggested by the achievements of the earlier age, were called for. A striving after exaggerated effect replaced the former determination to base every work of art upon the accurate observation of nature and the definite proportion of part and part. The later artists lacked the simple reserve which is only given to men who see life steadily and see it whole. In place of the deeps of Angelo, we find the shallows of Giovanni Bologna and his even less gifted contemporaries. Just because they are shoals, the turmoils surrounding them oftentimes appear tempestuous. But they never suggest the tremendous power which evidences the oceanic depths of the passions of a man who is not only a sculptor but a seer. BENVENUTO CELLINI The character of a typical sixteenth-century Italian artist has been preserved to us in the “Autobiography” of Cellini. From its pages we can conjure up the lives of the men who made this fifty years of Italian sculpture. Cellini, be it remembered, is no Bohemian hanging around the outskirts of the artistic world. On his death in February 13, 1571, his brothers of the Accademia delle Belle Arti record: “Messer Benvenuto Cellini was buried with great funeral pomp in our Chapter House at the Annunziata in the presence of our Academical Body and the Company.” But the “Autobiography” pictures a born swaggerer, a swashbuckler—a bully, if you like—though a gay-hearted genius withal. Let us examine Cellini’s life story rather more closely. When little more than a youth Cellini was banished from Florence on account of an affray with a party of his fellows. Returning, a second affair necessitated a flight to Rome, where he took part in the celebrated defence of the town against the Constable de Bourbon in 1527. Once more restored to favour in his native Florence, Cellini took upon himself to avenge his brother’s death. A murderous affray with a notary and an ultra-energetic manner of dealing with a rival goldsmith, ended in the two years’ confinement in the Castle of Saint Angelo with which all readers of the “Autobiography” are familiar. And in all these excitements, Cellini is never in the wrong. “What I have done, I have done in defence of that body which God has lent me.” Adopting the _apologia_ which he attributes to one of the numerous Popes with whom he came in contact, Cellini calls upon the world to recognize “that men like myself, unique in their profession, are subject to no laws.”