The candor and warm simplicity of Pisanello and Sperandio were perhaps lost sight of during those years while the earlier French master-medalists of the nineteenth century, David d’Angers, Oudiné, and Ponscarme, were paving the difficult way for a later and more sympathetic flowering of the medallic art in the hands of Roty, Chaplain, and Charpentier. But the delightful quality of the Renaissance medal was never more deeply appreciated in France than at the time when a goodly number of our American sculptors were studying there, and shared in that appreciation; and now that the modern reducing-machine allows the artist fully to develop his design for a medal in a fairly large size before bringing it within the final small circumference, it is certainly well for him to bear in mind the admirable results obtained by the less sophisticated quattrocento methods. Never before has the medalist had at hand as many excellent mechanical aids as at present. Never before has he faced a greater need of remembering the value of clarity in his vision, of simplicity and sincerity in his touch. Some of our purists maintain that every medal should be modeled from first to last in its ultimate size, however trying and meticulous this task may be. But does not such strictness denote a rather rabid hostility to mechanical contrivances? There are medals whose intricate yet logical design could hardly be carried out by the human hand, no matter how skilful, within the narrow limits thus prescribed. Of this type is the plaquette designed by Saint-Gaudens as a token of gratitude to all who took part in the Masque of the Golden Bowl, offered to him on a famous anniversary. “Within its harmonious oblong are shown the columns and the blazing altar and the Greek seat that figured in the scene, framed by the proscenium arch of great New England pines, and by the stage-curtains crowned with masks invented by the joyous fancy of Maxfield Parrish; below is the triumphal chariot; and, as a symbol of the love that prompted the pageant, there stands by the altar the winged figure of Amor, who has borrowed the lyre of Apollo. The names of the seventy figurants are beautifully inscribed, making a decoration for certain spaces in the background; this feature, naturally prized by those who received the medal, was made possible by modeling the original on a large scale. Here is no hodge-podge of unrelated symbols, but a beautiful and lovingly considered arrangement of deeply significant things. We associate with it the same sculptor’s Columbus medal-obverse, and many reductions, in plaquette form, from his portrait reliefs. While delighting in the conceptions of antiquity and of the Renaissance, Saint-Gaudens, more than any other master of his day, made a faithful study of all the conditions of the modern portrait relief.” [Illustration: PLAQUETTE BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS]