The Italian teaching was further assisted by the settlement in Spain of a family of Italian artists, Leone Leoni, Pompeo his son, and Michael the grandson, who for three generations were employed by Charles V. and Philip II. They carved for the Escorial statues of the Emperor, of Philip II., and members of the royal family, as well as the bas-reliefs of the retablo of the high altar, which Herrera had designed, and two groups in gilt-bronze placed under the tribunes to the right and left of the altar. In addition these artists executed many statues in bronze and in marble for the churches and royal palace. These works, by reason of their purity of line and beauty, exercised a beneficial and widespread influence on the native sculptors. Cean Bermudez, in Spain, unites with Vasari, in Italy, in praising the Leoni family. One of the first Spanish artists to frequent the schools of Italy, where he is wrongly stated to have been a pupil of Donatello, was Damian Forment, a native of Valencia, who lived and worked in the fifteenth and first third of the sixteenth centuries. Donatello died in 1466, and as Forment returned to Spain in 1509, when still young, he could not have been the pupil of the great Italian. But whoever was his master, he was a great artist, the most famous of the Aragonese sculptors, and his works are the purest examples of the new Italian taste. That he esteemed himself we know, for he calls himself “the rival of Phidias and Praxiteles”; while the fact that he was allowed the unusual privilege of inserting life-size medallions of himself and his wife at the base of his great altar-screens at Zaragoza and Huesca shows how high a place he held in the popular estimation.