ITALIAN ORNAMENT.


works of Baldassare Peruzzi, interesting though they be, since, so far as
ornament was concerned, they
approached so closely to the antique as to offer no striking individuality.
 Bramante, too, is to be
regarded rather as a Renaissance artist than in any other light. It is to
the great Florentine, whose
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for that germ of self-willed originality that infected all his contemporaries
in every
department of art, and engendered a license which, it is vain to deny, ultimately,
and in feebler hands than his, resulted in a departure from taste and refinement
in
every branch of art.
Michael Angelo was born in 1474 of the noble Florentine family of the
Buonarrotti, descendants of the Counts of Canossa: he was a pupil of Domenico
Ghirlandaio; and having early distinguished himself by his talent for sculpture,
he
was invited to study in the school founded for its culture by Lorenzo de
Medici.
OD the banishment of the Medici family from Florence in 1494, Michael Angelo
retired to Bologna, where he worked at the tomb of St. Dominic; after some
little
time he returned to Florence, and, before he was twenty-three years of age,
he
had executed the celebrated "Cupid," which was the cause of his
being invited
to Rome, and also his "Bacchus."    At Rome, amongst many other
works by
him, is the "Pieta" sculptured by order of Cardinal d'Amboise,
and now in St.
Peter's. The gigantic statue of "David," at Florence, was his next
great per-
formance; and at twenty-nine years of age he returned to Rome, summoned by
Julius II. for the purpose of erecting his mausoleum; for this building the
" Moses'I
at San Pietro in Vincoli, and the "Slaves" in the Louvre, were
originally destined,
but it was completed on a smaller scale than was at first intended. The painting
of the Sistine Chapel was the next work undertaken by him, and one of his
greatest, whether we regard the sublimity of the performance, or the influence
which
it exercised on contemporary art, as well as on that of after-times.  In
1541 he
completed his vast fresco of the "Last Judgment," painted for Pope
Paul III. The
remainder of his long life was chiefly devoted to the construction of St.
Peter's, on
which work lie was employed at the time of his death, in 1564, and for which
he
refused all remuneration.
In everything executed during the long life of Michael Angelo the desire
for
novelty seems to have divided his attention from the study of excellence
alone. His
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design.  His large broken pediments and mouldings, his sweeping consoles
and   Vertical Ornament from
scrolls, his direct imitation (saving an alloy of exaggeration) of Nature
in some
of his enrichments, and the amount of plain face he uniformly preserved in
his architectural compo-
sitions, brought new elements into the field, which were greedily snapped
up by men of less inventive
power than he himself possessed. The style of the Roman school of design
was altogether changed
through Michael Angelo; and Giacomo della Porta, Domenico Fontana, Bartolomeo
Ammanati, Carlo
Maderno, and, last not least, Vignola himself, so far as ornament was concerned,
adopted, with a few
of his beauties, many of his defects, the greatest being exaggeration of
manner.  At Florence, Baccio
Bandinelli and Benvenuto Cellini were among his ardent admirers and imitators.
Happily Venice
escaped the contagion in a great degree,-or, at least, resisted its influence
longer than almost any
other part of Italy. This immunity was due, in a great degree, to the counteracting
influence of
a genius less hardy than that of Michael Angelo, but far more refined, and
scarcely less universal.
We allude, of course, to the greatest of the two Sansovinos-Giacopo.
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