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.
Gian Bologna, born at Douai, but a Florentine by education, devoted himself almost exclusively to mythological sculpture.