Andrea Pisano again; the head superb, founded on Greek models, feathers of wings wrought with extreme care; but with no precision of arrangement or feeling. How far intentional in awkwardness, I cannot say; but note the good mechanism of the whole plan, with strong standing board for the feet.
15. Navigation.
An intensely puzzling one; coarse (perhaps unfinished) in work, and done by a man who could not row; the plaited bands used for rowlocks being pulled the wrong way. Right, had the rowers been rowing Englishwise: but the water at the boat's head shows its motion forwards, the way the oarsmen look. I cannot make out the action of the figure at the stern; it ought to be steering with the stern oar.
The water seems quite unfinished. Meant, I suppose, for surface and section of sea, with slimy rock at the bottom; but all stupid and inefficient.
16. Hercules and Antæus.
The Earth power, half hidden by the earth, its hair and hand becoming roots, the strength of its life passing through the ground into the oak tree. With Cercyon, but first named, (Plato, Laws, book VII., 796), Antæus is the master of contest without use;—[GREEK: philoneikias achrestou]—and is generally the power of pure selfishness and its various inflation to insolence and degradation to cowardice;—finding its strength only in fall back to its Earth,—he is the master, in a word, of all such kind of persons as have been writing lately about the "interests of England." He is, therefore, the Power invoked by Dante to place Virgil and him in the lowest circle of Hell;—"Alcides whilom felt,—that grapple, straitened sore," etc. The Antæus in the sculpture is very grand; but the authorship puzzles me, as of the next piece, by the same hand. I believe both Giotto's design.
17. Ploughing.
The sword in its Christian form. Magnificent: the grandest expression of the power of man over the earth and its strongest creatures that I remember in early sculpture,—(or for that matter, in late). It is the subduing of the bull which the sculptor thinks most of; the plough, though large, is of wood, and the handle slight. But the pawing and bellowing labourer he has bound to it!—here is victory.
18. The Chariot.
The horse also subdued to draught—Achilles' chariot in its first, and to be its last, simplicity. The face has probably been grand—the figure is so still. Andrea's, I think by the flying drapery.