He remains, too, one of the very finest, even in a competition
constantly growing more exacting since his day. He had a very particular
talent, and it was exhibited in manifold ways. He is as fine in relief
as in the round. His decorative quality is as eminent as his purely
sculptural side. Compared with his Italian contemporaries he is at once
full of feeling and severe. He has nothing of Pilon's chameleon-like
imitativeness. He does not, on the other hand, break with the traditions
of the best models known to him--and, undoubtedly he knew the best. His
works cover and line the Louvre, and anyone who visits Paris may get a
perfect conception of his genius--certainly anyone who in addition
visits Rouen and beholds the lovely tracery of his earliest sculpture on
the portal of St. Maclou. He was eminently the sculptor of an educated
class, and appealed to a cultivated appreciation. Coming as he did at
the acme of the French Renaissance, when France was borrowing with
intelligent selection whatever it considered valuable from Italy, he
pleased the dilettanti. There is something distinctly "swell" in his
work. He does not perhaps express any overmastering personal feeling,
nor does he stamp the impress of French national character on his work
with any particular emphasis. He is too well-bred and too cultivated, he
has too much _aplomb_. But his works show both more personal feeling and
more national character than the works of his contemporaries elsewhere.
For line he has a very intimate instinct, and of mass, in the sculptor's
as well as the painter's sense, he has a native comprehension. Compare
his "Diana" of the Louvre with Cellini's in the adjoining room from the
point of view of pure sculpture. Goujon's group is superb in every way.
Cellini's figure is tormented and distorted by an impulse of decadent
though decorative æstheticism. Goujon's caryatides and figures of the
Innocents Fountain are equally sculptural in their way--by no means
arabesques, as is so much of Renaissance relief, and the modern relief
that imitates it. Everything in fine that Goujon did is unified with the
rest of his work and identifiable by the mark of style.