The influence of beauty upon arts usually considered as mechanical, and the exercise of creative talent upon substances of a common or trifling character, are equally proofs of a pervading refinement. It was accordingly a striking feature of Italy in her golden days, that nearly every sort of handiwork felt that influence, and in its turn served to maintain public taste at an elevated standard. To uncultivated or unobservant minds it may seem ridiculous to appreciate the state of high art in a country from the forms of culinary utensils, the colouring of plates, or the carving of a peach-stone; yet the elegance of Etruscan civilisation is nowhere more manifest than in household bronzes; the majolica of Urbino has preserved the designs and the feeling of Raffaele; the genius of Cellini did not spurn the most homely materials. The architects of the Revival were often sculptors; its engineers constructed clocks; while painters then exercised the crafts of jewellery and wood-gilding, or lent their pencils to beautify the potter's handiwork. Our undertaking would accordingly be incomplete without some notice of majolica, or decorative pottery, which under the patronage of her princes brought fame and wealth to the duchy of Urbino.[238] [Footnote 238: We have had frequent occasion to notice the encouragement given at Urbino to the exact sciences, and the consequent success of those arts most depending upon them. Thus the Baroccio family were celebrated for the accuracy of their mathematical instruments and timepieces, while watchmaking attracted great attention from all the della Rovere dukes. Their family portraits very generally exhibit a table-clock of some eccentric form, and their gifts to princes and royal personages were often chronometers made in their state. One of these, sent to Pius V., exhibited the planetary movements and other complex revolutions of the solar system; another, worn by his Holiness in a ring, marked the hours by gently pricking his finger. In 1535, Francesco Maria I. presented to Charles V., at Naples, a ring wherein a watch struck the hours; and many similar notices occur in the correspondence of his grandson, the last Duke. Guidobaldo II. was especially fond of such mechanical curiosities. Having received from one Giovan Giorgio Capobianco of Vicenza, the Praxiteles of tiny chiselling, a ring which held a watch, whereupon were engraved the signs of the zodiac, with a figure that pointed to and struck the hours--he interfered to save the artist's life, when condemned to death for an assassination at Venice. In gratitude for this favour, the latter made for the Duchess a silver chessboard contained in a cherry-stone; nor should we omit to add that he displayed the same ingenuity on a wider field as an architect and engineer. So, too, Filippo Santacroce, of Urbino, and his sons, are celebrated by Count Cicognara for their minute carvings on gems, ivory, and nuts.]