55. We could have wished that Lord Lindsay had further insisted on what will be found to be a characteristic of all the truly Christian or spiritual, as opposed to classical, schools of sculpture--the scenic or painter-like management of effect. The marble is not cut into the actual form of the thing imaged, but oftener into a perspective suggestion of it--the bas-reliefs sometimes almost entirely under cut, and sharpedged, so as to come clear off a dark ground of shadow; even heads the size of life being in this way rather shadowed out than carved out, as the Madonna of Benedetto de Majano in Santa Maria Novella, one of the cheeks being advanced half an inch out of its proper place--and often the most audacious violations of proportion admitted, as in the limbs of Michael Angelo's sitting Madonna in the Uffizii; all artifices, also, of deep and sharp cutting being allowed, to gain the shadowy and spectral expressions about the brow and lip which the mere actualities of form could not have conveyed;--the sculptor never following a material model, but feeling after the most momentary and subtle aspects of the countenance--striking these out sometimes suddenly, by rude chiseling, and stopping the instant they are attained--never risking the loss of thought by the finishing of flesh surface. The heads of the Medici sacristy we believe to have been thus left unfinished, as having already the utmost expression which the marble could receive, and incapable of anything but loss from further touches. So with Mino da Fiesole and Jacopo della Quercia, the workmanship is often hard, sketchy, and angular, having its full effect only at a little distance; but at that distance the statue becomes ineffably alive, even to startling, bearing an aspect of change and uncertainty, as if it were about to vanish, and withal having a light, and sweetness, and incense of passion upon it that silences the looker-on, half in delight, half in expectation. This daring stroke--this transfiguring tenderness--may be shown to characterize all truly Christian sculpture, as compared with the antique, or the pseudo-classical of subsequent periods. We agree with Lord Lindsay in thinking the Psyche of Naples the nearest approach to the Christian ideal of all ancient efforts; but even in this the approximation is more accidental than real--a fair type of feature, further exalted by the mode in which the imagination supplies the lost upper folds of the hair. The fountain of life and emotion remains sealed; nor was the opening of that fountain due to any study of the far less pure examples accessible by the Pisan sculptors. The sound of its waters had been heard long before in the aisles of the Lombard; nor was it by Ghiberti, still less by Donatello, that the bed of that Jordan was dug deepest, but by Michael Angelo (the last heir of the Byzantine traditions descending through Orcagna), opening thenceforward through