He did so with consummate science and complete mastery of physiological law.

What is more, he compelled the body to become expressive, not, as the Greeks had done, of broad general conceptions, but of the most intimate and poignant personal emotions.

This was his main originality.

At the same time, being a Romantic, he deliberately renounced the main tradition of that manner.

He refused to study portraiture, as Vasari tells us, and as we see so plainly in the statues of the Dukes at Florence.