312 IDENTIFICATION OF THE ARTISAN AND ARTIST. 



and then was tempted, seeing that these were things sought after, (it 

 appears with the most honest intention,) to imitate them : and lie found 

 that they were bought and put in royal and ijnperial cabinets as real 

 work of what is called cinqnecento. And then he imitated the shields, 

 working exactly upon Cellini's principle, that everything, however small, 

 is worked out separately, and then fastened together ; that nothing is 

 cast, but that everything, to the smallest tip of the least finger, is hoi 

 low; and he worked on, and produced it by his .artistic and careful ma- 

 nipulation. He began to work this way, and he found his silver-work also 

 became considered as ancient, and was adopted iuto collections of valuable 

 antiquities. He then learned the power of his own genius, and he soon 

 rose ; and, when the late revolution in Fi-ance took place, he had com- 

 missions for works to the amount of £00,000. And this was all his own 

 work, the production of Ms own hands. However, his losses were in 

 common with many others who had engaged in higher branches of art, 

 and he has been since in this country ; but certainly those specimens of 

 his work which we had in the exhibition were not only most beautiful, 

 but most exquisite ; and many persons who took the i)ains to examine 

 in detail some of the works in silver, which were presented by one 

 French house in particular — the Freres Maurice — must have been struck 

 by the high artistic merit of them all. And they all are worked entirely 

 bit by bit by the artist; and it was impossible they could be executed 

 but by an artist who could model as well as draw, and who knew how 

 to treat his metal perfectly, so as to give all the softness, beauty, and 

 delicacy of the original model.. 



Xow let us proceed to what may be considered a higher branch of 

 art, aud that is sculpture. We shall find exactly the same principle 

 throughout ; all the greatest artists of the most flourishing period Avere 

 men who did their own 2cor]c. You are probably aware — many, I have 

 no doubt, are — at the jiresent day, when a sculptor has to produce a 

 statue he first of all makes his model in clay; probably a drawing first, 

 then a small model, then a model exactly as he intends the statue to be, 

 full-sized and completely finished ; from this the cast is taken in plaster ; 

 the block of marble of proper size is put beside it, and a frame over it 

 from which there hang threads with weights ; these form the points 

 from which the workman measures, from corresponding lines, first to 

 the models, and then from these which are over the cast to the cast it- 

 self; and by means of the merest mechanical i^rocess he gradually cuts 

 away the marble to the shape of his cast, and often brings it so near to 

 the finished work that the artist himself barely spends a few weeks upon 

 it. This was so much the case with a very eminent sculptor that it is 

 well known he hardly ever had occasion to touch it. 



Now that was not the way the ancients worked : they knew perfectly 

 well that there was more feeling in the few touches which the master-hand 

 gives, even from the very l)eginning of the work, than there can be in 

 the low aud plodding process of mechanical labor; and we find that 



