66 All the works of Michael Angelo, whether sculpture, painting, or
drawing partake of the nature of bas-relief, that old Tuscan art
developed to such good purpose by the Florentines. The marks of his
chisel hatch out the forms and develop the planes just as the
parallel strokes of his pen cut out the reliefs of his drawings from
the paper. His method of sculpture in the round was that of a carver
of bas-reliefs. He gradually cut away the background more and more
until the relief was actually the highest relief possible, the
round. Every piece of sculpture Michael Angelo executed is the
better for a background, whether niche or wall, for they all partake
of this bas-relief nature; and his paintings and drawings may every
one of them be thought of as bas-reliefs, and so it is with all the
works of the Florentines, his contemporaries and predecessors. Space
and distance never entered into their calculations before the time
of Piero di Cosimo and his pupil Andrea del Sarto, and even then
with but indifferent results. They were all content with the flat
bas-relief effects familiar to them in the gates of the Baptistry
and the jewel-like decorations of the Campanile. Their favourite
problem was the expression of force by form, and no art was so
useful for that purpose as bas-relief, because of its fixed main
lines of composition and its absolute power of expressing the detail
of the action of muscle and bone.
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