Some years before his death Ammanati expressed in public his regret that he had made so many giants and satyrs, feeling that, by exhibiting forms of lust, brutality, and animalism to the gaze of his fellow-countrymen, he had sinned against the higher law revealed by Christianity.  For a Greek artist to have spoken thus would have been impossible.  The Faun, the Titan, and the Satyr had a meaning for him, which he sought to set forth in accordance with the semi-religious, semi-poetical traditions of his race; and when he was at work upon a myth of nature-forces, he well knew that at the other end of the scale, separated by no spiritual barrier, but removed to an almost infinite distance of refinement, Zeus, Phoebus, and Pallas claimed his loftier artistic inspiration.  Ammanati’s confession, on the contrary, betrays that schism between the conscience of Christianity and the lusts let loose by ill-assimilated sympathy with antique heathenism, which was a marked characteristic of the Renaissance.  The coarser passions, held in check by ecclesiastical discipline, dared to emerge into the light of day under the supposed sanction of classical examples.  What the Visconti and the Borgias practised in their secret chambers, the sculptors exposed in marble and the poets in verse.  All alike, however, were mistaken in supposing that antique precedent sanctioned this efflorescence of immorality.  No amount of Greek epigrams by Strato and Meleager, nor all the Hermaphrodites and Priapi of Rome, had power to annul the law of conduct established by the founders of Christianity, and ratified by the higher instincts of the Middle Ages.  Nor again were artists justified before the bar of conscience in selecting the baser elements of Paganism for imitation, instead of aiming at Greek self-restraint and Roman strength of character.  All this the men of the Renaissance felt when they listened to the voice within them.  Their work, therefore, in so far as it pretended to be a reconstruction of the antique was false.  The sensuality it shared in common with many Greek and Roman masterpieces, had ceased to be frank and in the true sense pagan.  To shake off Christianity, and to revert with an untroubled conscience to the manners of a bygone age, was what they could not do.

The errors I have attempted to characterise did not, however, prevent the better and more careful works of sculpture, executed in illustration of classical mythology, from having a true value.  The “Perseus” of Cellini and some of Gian Bologna’s statues belong to a class of aesthetic productions which show how much that is both original and excellent may be raised in the hotbed of culture.[117] They express a genuine moment of the Renaissance with vigour, and deserve to be ranked with the Latin poetry of Poliziano, Bembo, and Pontano.  The worst that can be said of them is that their inspiration was factitious, and that their motives had been handled better in the age of Greek sincerity.