. Italian medals . st the nobles,procurators, and canons here depicted have looked during life!So convincingly does the absolutely photographic fidelity ofthe portraits force itself on the beholder. The master, it istrue, was obliged to pay a heavy penalty for his keen grasp ofthe actual in the scenes on his reverses, so awkwardly com-posed, so hard, occasionally so ill-modelled, are his allegoricalfigures. Contemporary with the monk of Brescia, though beginningearlier and ending later, Vittore Gambello or Camelio dis-played great energy as goldsmith, die-engraver, bronzesculptor, and medallis
. Italian medals . st the nobles,procurators, and canons here depicted have looked during life!So convincingly does the absolutely photographic fidelity ofthe portraits force itself on the beholder. The master, it istrue, was obliged to pay a heavy penalty for his keen grasp ofthe actual in the scenes on his reverses, so awkwardly com-posed, so hard, occasionally so ill-modelled, are his allegoricalfigures. Contemporary with the monk of Brescia, though beginningearlier and ending later, Vittore Gambello or Camelio dis-played great energy as goldsmith, die-engraver, bronzesculptor, and medallist. His earliest medal, that of Sixtus IV.,must have been made before 1484; his latest, that of the DogeAndrea Gritti, is of the year 1523. In his early works, suchas the portraits of the two artist brothers Gentile and GiovanniBellini (PI. XV., 5, XVI., i), he still displays the vigorousrealistic conception of the Quattrocento ; in his later he becomes weaker in expression, more indistinct in modelling. 78 Plate XV. The Medallists of Venicet etc* See, for instance, the medal already mentioned (p. 56) of theCardinal Domenico Grimani (PL XVI., 2), the most brilliantMaecenas of Venice, who bequeathed to the museum of theducal palace his collection of ancient statues, and to whomthe library owes the breviary of world-wide celebrity thatbears his name. In the manner in which, on the reverse ofthe Grimani medal, Gambello has invested the composition ofGiancristoforo Romano with his own individuality of style, hisown expression of form, the weakness of the scenes on thereverses of his medals in general is clearly brought to see that generalised beauty of form, going back to the im-perfectly understood model of Greek relief, which governs allthe later sculpture of Venice ; the excessive precision in poseand gesture in which all direct living force is lost; the over-done, entirely pictorial scenes with elaborate effects of per-spective, and subjects usually imitated from the an
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