The figures of beasts and children found in the original are retained but changed. They are executed in the full spirit of the Renaissance, looking back to mythology. We have Cupids now and Genii, Tritons and Sirens, and in place of the Gothic crab the Renaissance dolphin. The ornamentation of the candlesticks is completely Italianate. The slender, graceful columns which hold the candelabra are decorated now with a continually varying luxuriance of ornament, recalling in form a hundred details at Como, at Bergamo and at the Certosa of Pavia. In the case of the mythological figures there is no caricature; there are none of the monstrosities in which German art usually revelled when dealing with such subjects. The artist has gone straight to Italy, to the source of the new springs of knowledge and of the new-born delight in the gods of old days. There is, too, an inexhaustible fecundity of pose. Scarce one beast or child is the same. You might almost suppose that the artist had aimed at giving us an encyclopædia of Nature, showing that all-embracing enthusiasm which rendered so many of the great minds of the Renaissance eager to excel in every department of knowledge. Each minutest figure also displays a masterly grip of anatomy, proportion and perspective, and here we clearly recognize the student of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings. The figures of the four heroes and of the lute-player are of the school of Leonardo in pose, in modelling and in drapery, whilst the Marsyas may be traced, as Seeger thinks, to a woodcut in a Venetian edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1497).