876 Sir Rennell Rodd [June 3, 



think there is justification for the re-estabhshment of a personaHty 

 new to general experience, and for a differentiation of his work from 

 that of the better known Mino of Fiesole, who has hitherto been 

 credited with it. 



Mino da Fiesole no doubt, did important work in Rome, and 

 exercised influence over other sculptors there. To appreciate what 

 he really did, the chronology of his visits is important. Leaving un- 

 touched the question of whether or not he was the author of the 

 Strozzi bust in the Berlin Museum, with an inscription recording 

 that it was made by him at Rome in 1454, when he can only have 

 been 21 or 22, we know from the Vatican registers that he was there 

 in 146:->, when he was employed together with Isaiah and Paolo on 

 sculptures for a pulpit which Pius II. designed to place outside the 

 Basilica of St. Peter's, from which to give the benediction. This 

 pulpit was never finished, but the statues of the Apostles made for it 

 may be seen in the crypt of St. Peter's. To this period no doubt 

 belong some panels made for a casquet to contain relics of St. Jerome 

 ordered by Cardinal d'Estouteville for Sta. Maria Maggiore, which 

 church his eminence was restoring at his own cost. They may be 

 seen to-day in the Industrial Museum at Rome, and are of extremely 

 poor workmanship, though unmistakably revealing Mine's character- 

 istic style. In the Vatican registers no mention of him is traceable 

 during the reign of Paul II., 1467-1471, and we can account for his 

 presence elsewhere from 1469-7:-^. He was apparently recalled to 

 Rome in or about 1474, in the reign of Sixtus IV., to carry out the 

 monument of his predecessor. In 14S0 he was back in Florence, and 

 in 1484 he died. 



The manner of Mino da Fiesole is well known to all who have 

 studied Italian art ; the fine and delicate folds of his draperies, his 

 constant use of sharp angles, with a prevailing suggestion of the 

 diamond shape, which even seems to pervade faces and individual 

 features ; the thick eyelid and half -closed eye ; the sharp knee, pro- 

 truding through the diaphanous dress fabric; the regular fall 

 in rather conventional repeating angles of draperies between the open 

 knees of his seated figures ; the flat treatment of hair, consistent with 

 his general shadowless scheme, free from all deep cutting ; the weak 

 and rather meaningless pose of the hands ; the secular and aristocratic 

 type of his Madonnas, as opposed to the devotional type ; all these, 

 together with a certain preciousness and an artist's love of his material, 

 which make him give the marble an ivory-like polish, and in his 

 later work an elaboration of delicate ornament and tracery. 



During his second visit to Rome after 1474, we must rather regard 

 him as having been the guiding spirit of a great workshop from 

 which issued a number of the finest monuments of the period. No 

 single one is entirely from his hand, unless it be the tomb of Fran- 

 cesco Tuornaboni, in the Minerva Church, which was probably carried 

 out in Florence. These extensive commissions were probably divided 



