Romance in Metal Work 
I said just now that forms of utility never evolved 
art, but that they were means of stirring the imagina¬ 
tion; and in carefully studying some of the beautiful 
little bronzes in the Pierpont Morgan Collection, the 
Salting Collection, and the Fitz Henry Collection in 
the South Kensington Museum, I was amazed at the 
extent to which the imagination of the great Italian 
and other masters of the Renaissance had been 
stirred by the purpose of the objects they had so 
lovingly and carefully designed. 
The masters of the Renaissance took their bronze 
seriously in their use of it for all articles great or small. 
What happier thought than in the inkstand of the 
school of Sansovino (fig. 3) in which the artist has 
endeavored to tell you by the figure of Marsyas that 
men are bound by their written words—a lasting 
rebuke to arrogance; or the other one with Eros and 
the flaming torch (fig. 2)—a little delicate suggestion 
that even in those days there were such things as 
love-letters to be written and victims to be obtained ^ 
What more delicate satire than this winged female 
sphinx for a door-knocker (fig. 4) What more 
delightful fancy than the skill of this artist’s presenta- 
FIGURE 6 
FIGURE 7 
tion of a saltcellar—a triton astride a dolphin bearing 
salt from the ocean (fig. 6) ? 
But this was no original treatment on the part of 
the masters of the Renaissance, and we can imagine 
that just as Petrarch and Ariosto were inspired by the 
masters of Greek and Roman literature, so the 
sculptors of that period were indebted to the Romans 
and Greeks for their ideals, and it is not far to seek 
for the source of origin when we see such an example 
of caressing the imagination illustrated in the use of 
the sea-horse on this Roman water vessel (fig. 5); 
or Mercury counting his money in the handles of 
this vase of iron and bronze (fig. 7), both belonging 
to the Pierpont Morgan Collection. 
But there is a subtle difference between the work 
of the Greek—and with the Greek I connect the 
Roman—and the artist of the Renaissance which I 
feel (I speak of it only in parenthesis), because it 
supports a contention I often put forward when I 
hear some of our leading architects contend that no 
individuality of the metal worker is required in the art 
on their buildings, but simply a repetition of the old 
