The same degeneration prevailed in sculpture. Michelangelo, in his statues in the Medicean chapel at Florence, "Night" and "Day," "Evening" and "Dawn" (1529-34), had achieved the utmost which thought and emotion could express in marble. They stand, pillars set up by Hercules, at the end of the noble sculpture of the Renaissance. His successors tried to imitate him, in vain; they produced bulk, or writhing or distortion. Yet some men of this period did excellent work: Benvenuto Cellini, delicate goldsmith, and sculptor of the Florentine Perseus; John of Bologna, who modelled the Flying Mercury; Taddeo Landini of Florence, who designed the charming fountain in Rome, in which several boys are boosting turtles into a basin above; Bandinelli, whose big statues are familiar in Florence, "a man strangely composed," as Burckhardt says, "of natural talent, of reminiscence of the old school, and of a false originality which carried him beyond a disregard of nicety even to grossness." After these men and a few others, sculpture followed architecture in its facile descent into the Baroque, and expressed itself in prophets, saints, and Popes, who stand in swaying and vacillating postures in nave and aisle, on roof and balustrade. These decadent sculptors strictly belong to the next century; they are but heralded by the last works of the Cinquecento. In painting, too, the same story is repeated all over Italy. In Florence after the close of the High Renaissance twilight darkened rapidly. There are few artists of note except two fashionable portrait painters, Pontormo and Bronzino, who display the characteristics of the period. Bronzino's picture of the Descent of Christ into Hades almost justifies Ruskin's comment, a "heap of cumbrous nothingness and sickening offensiveness;" on the other hand, Pontormo's decorations in the great hall of the Medicean Villa at Poggio a Caiano are as graceful, gay, and charming as can well be imagined. After them in dreary succession come the decadent painters, who painted figures bigger and bigger in would-be Michelangelesque attitudes, as may be seen in one of the rooms of the _Belle Arti_ in Florence. Elsewhere, also, the generation bred under the great masters faded away,--the sweet Luini of Milan, Leonardo's follower; the facile Giulio Romano, Raphael's pupil; the beauty-loving Sodoma of Siena; the romantic Dosso Dossi of Ferrara. These names show how loath the genius of painting was to leave Italy, but she obeyed fate; and, at the end of the century, we have the Caracci beginning to paint in Bologna, and Caravaggio (1569-1609) in Naples. It needs but a glance at these later pictures to see what a change had come over the spirit of beauty during the hundred years since Botticelli painted Venus fresh from the salt sea foam.