M. Agnolo appears to have had no infancy; if he had, we are not acquainted with it. His earliest works are equal in principle and compass of execution to the vigorous proofs of his virility. Like an oriental sun, he burst upon us at once, without a dawn. Raffaello Sanzio we see in his cradle, we hear him stammer, but _propriety_ rocked the cradle, and _character_ formed his lips. Even in the trammels of Pietro Perugino, dry and servile in his style of design, he traced what was essential, and separated it from what was accidental in his model. The works of Lionardo da Vinci and the Cartoon of Pisa are said to have invigorated his eye, but it was the Antique that completed the system which he had begun to establish on Nature; from them he learned discrimination and choice of forms. He found that in the construction of the body the articulations of the bones were the true cause of ease and grace in the action of the limbs, and that the knowledge of this was the reason of the superiority of antique design. He found that certain features were fittest for certain expressions and peculiar to certain characters; that such a head, such hands, such feet, are the stamen or the growth of such a body, and on physiognomy established homogeneousness. Of all artists he was the greatest, the most precise, the most acute observer. When he designed, he first attended to the primary intention and motive of his figure, next to its general measure, then to the bones and their articulations; from them to the principal muscles, or the muscles eminently wanted, and their attendant nerves, and at last to the more or less essential minutiæ. But the characteristic part of the subject is infallibly the characteristic part of his design, if it be formed even by a few rapid or a single stroke of his pen or pencil. The strokes themselves are characteristic, they follow or indicate the texture or fibre of the part; flesh in their rounding, nerves in straight, bones in angular touches.