Dialectic

Together with the figures of the other Liberal Arts, it forms part of the decoration of the base of the sarcophagus, which illustrates, with the aim of humanist celebration, the virtues and cultural interests of the Pope, in keeping with the most ambitious aims of the humanist mentality, more Florentine than Roman in character. For whereas in Rome the mediation with the classical world always suffered from the cultural heaviness of imperial decadence, in the Florence of the Medici the rediscovery of antiquity was already filtered through a decidedly critical and even subtly polemical sensibility. The whole of Pollaiuolo's monument comes alive in an impetuous flowering of arabesques (the animism that vivifies and torments all matter, as in Verrocchio), and the figures, even those taken from classical iconography, uncoil nervously to follow that continuous flow of energy. This obsessive pictorial movement of the modelling consumes every spatial division, even though it governs the architecture of the tomb in a finely calibrated perspective framework.