RENAISSANCE ORNAMENT.
of specimens, in the majority of which gracefulness of line, and a highly
artificial, though apparently
natural, distribution of the ornament upon its field, are the prevailing
characteristics. The Lombardi,
in their works at the Church of Sta. Maria dei Miracoli, Venice (Plate LXXIV.,
Figs. 1, 8, 9; Plate
LXXVI., Fig. 2); Andrea Sansovino at Rome (Plate LXXVI., Fig. 1); and Domenico
and Bernardino
di Mantua, at Venice (Plate LXXIV., Figs. 5 and 7), attained the highest
perfection in these respects.
At a subsequent period to that in which they flourished the ornaments were
generally wrought in more
uniformly high relief, and the stems and tendrils were thickened, and not
so uniformly tapered, the
accidental growth and play of nature were less sedulously imitated, the field
of the panel was more
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more bustling and less refined. The sculptor's work as-
serted itself in competition with the architect's: the latter
in self-defence, and to keep the sculpture down, soon be-
gan to make his mouldinDs heavy:


and a more ponderous style altogether
crept into fashion.  Of this tendency
to plethora in ornament we already
perceive indications in much of the
Genoese work represented in Plate
LXXV., Figs. 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 11;
and in Plate LXXVI., Figs. 4, 5, 7, 8,
and 10. Fig. 6 in the last-mentioned
plate, from the celebrated Martinengo
Tomb, at Brescia, also clearly exhibits
this tendency to filling up.
In the art of painting, a move-
ment took place concurrent with that
we have thus briefly noticed in sculp-
ture. Giotto, the pupil of Cimabue,
threw off the shackles of Greek tra-
dition, and gave his whole heart to
nature.  His ornament, like that of
his master, consisted of a combination


Ve9nai fun lagu rnament  WsU pO.             11I UJObILC VYU, iuaeriiCig.
fom the Church of Sta.                                 Portion of a Doorway
in one of the Palaees of the Dorias neaw the
Mariadei Miracoli, Venice.  bends, and free rendering of the acan-  Church
of San Matteo, Genoa.
thus. In his work at Assisi, Naples, Florence, and Padua, he has invariably
shown a graceful appre-
hension of the balance essential to be maintained between mural pictures
and mural ornaments, both
in quantity, distribution, and relative colour.  These right principles of
balance were very generally
understood and adopted during the fourteenth century; and Simone Memmi, Taddeo
Bartolo, the
Orcagnas, Pietro di Lorenzo, Spinello Aretino, and many others, were admitted
masters of mural em-
bellishment. That rare student of nature in the succeeding century, Benozzo
Gozzoli, was a no less
diligent student of antiquity, as may be recognised in the architectural
backgrounds to his pictures in
the Campo Santo, and in the noble arabesques which divide his pictures at
San Gimignano. Andrea
Mantegna, however, it was who moved painting as Donatello had moved sculpture,
and that not in
figures alone, but in every variety of ornament borrowed from the antique.
The magnificent cartoons
we are so fortunate as to possess of his at Hampton Court, even to their
minutest decorative details,
might have been drawn by an ancient Roman. Towards the close of the fifteenth
century, the style,
116




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