IDENTIFICATION OF THE ARTISAN AND ARTIST. 307 



other. There is ns much art in the finish by his own hand, in every 

 enamel, in the setting of every stone, as there is in the entire design; 

 nor does he ever dream of talking- of himself in any other vray ; and yet how 

 he went on from step to step, nntil at length he produced the most mag- 

 nificent works, on the largest scale, in marble and in bronze ! He describes 

 how he constructed his own Perseus. He went to buy his own wood, 

 and saw it brought; and when he was casting that most exquisite statue 

 of Perseus, which is still one of the wonders of art, he had every sort of 

 misfortune. His furnace blew up, the roof was blown off, and the rain 

 came in torrents upon the fire just the moment that the metal was going to 

 be poured in. By his ingenuity, his extraordinary contrivances, he baffled, 

 it might appear, the whole chain of accidents, and brought out, almost 

 without a flaw, that most perfect piece of workmanshij). You may 

 imagine to what a state he was reduced, when, the very moment that 

 the metal was ready for pouring out, the explosion took place. He had 

 no other resource but to run to his kitchen, as he says, and to take every 

 piece of copper, to the amount of two hundred porringers and different 

 sorts of kettles, and throw them into the fire; and from these that splen- 

 did statue came forth. There was genius. 



As a curious instance of the most extraordinary ingenuity, he tells us 

 that on one occasion a surgeon came into his shop to perform an opera- 

 tion on the hand of one of his pui:)ils. U]xm looking at his instruments, 

 he found them, as they were in those days, so exceedingly rude and 

 clumsy, that he said, " If you will only wait half an hour, I will make you a 

 better instrument;" and he went into his workshop, and took a piece of 

 steel, and brought out a most beautifully finished knife, with which the 

 operation was successfully ijerformed, Kow this man, at the time you 

 see him thus working in his shop as a common workman, was modeling 

 in the most exquisite manner in wax; spending his evenings in the pri- 

 vate apartments of the Grand Duke, modeling in his presence, and assist- 

 ing him with a hundred little trifles which are now considered treasures 

 of art. And so wherever he was, and under all circumstances, he acted 

 as an artist, but at the same time as a truly laboring artisan. It was the 

 same with others in the same profession. He was not the only man, by 

 any means, whose genius was so universal; because we find him telling 

 us repeatedly that the moment he heard of some goldsmith (and in those 

 days a goldsmith was really an artist, as I have already said) who excelled 

 in any particular branch of art, he determined to excel him. Thus it 

 was that he grew to rival the medals of one, the enamels of another, the 

 peculiar manner of putting foil to precious stones of another; and, in 

 fact, there was not a branch of art which he did not consider it his duty 

 to excel in. With this spirit, is it wonderful that men of really great taste 

 should have been produced f men who, you observe, looked upon every 

 branch of productive art as really a branch of the higher art of design ; 

 and thus in their own persons combined that art with the power of the 

 tool; were artists as well as artisans. 



