gave relatively small scope for the personal aspects of tragedy.  There was no need for vicarious or redemptive suffering:  what pain existed, and they rarely expressed it in marble, was human in its origin and punitive in effect:  Icarus, Niobe, Laocoon, Prometheus; and even here the proprieties of good taste imposed strict limits, beyond which the portrayal of tragedy could not go without violating unwritten laws.  It had to occupy a secondary place in their art:  the dying gladiator was merely a broken toy tossed aside.  Their tragedies were largely limited to Nemesis, the Moirai, the Erinnydes, and lower forms, such as harpies.  But occasionally one gets a breath of mediaevalism and its haunting mysteries.  The Sleeping Fury at Rome, for instance,[202] where sleep steals in during a moment of respite from torture, is superb, and, moreover, stands almost alone in its presentment of a certain impelling tragedy, which, with the advent of Christianity, became an integral and dominating feature of its art.

[Footnote 200:  Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 7577, 1861.  M.G.  Dreyfus has a fine plaquette analogous to these large reliefs.]

[Footnote 201:  Cf., for instance, Madame Andre’s Pieta lunette, or the stone “Lamentation” in Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 314, 1878, almost German in its harsh realism.  This came from the Palazzo Lazzara at Padua.]

[Footnote 202:  In Ludovisi Buoncompagni Collection, Museo Nazionale, marble. Cf. also the bust of Minatia Polla, so called, which might be by Verrocchio.]

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Alinari

SUPER ALTAR BY GIOVANNI DA PISA

EREMITANI CHURCH, PADUA]

[Sidenote:  Donatello’s Assistants.]

The variety of workmanship at Padua would be an infallible proof that Donatello had the assistance of a number of disciples, even if we had no documentary evidence on the point.  Bandinelli refers to their numbers:  when needing help he wrote to the Grand Duke saying that Donatello always had eighteen or twenty assistants, without whose aid it would have been impossible for him to have made the Paduan altar.[203] But we also possess bills, contracts, and schedules, in which we can find the names of Donatello’s garzoni.  The work, it must be remembered, was not wholly confined to sculpture:  among the earliest recorded payment to Donatello is that for structural work on the Loggia (30, iii. 1444).  Giovanni Nani of Florence was already engaged there (3, iii. 43) as a sort of master mason on Donatello’s arrival:  he made the marble pedestal for the crucifix (19, vi. 47), and several others are mentioned in a subordinate capacity, such as Niccolo Cocaro (23, iv. 49), Meo and Pipo of Florence (30, iv. 49), Antonio of Lugano, taia pria (12, v. 49); Bartolomeo of Ferrara went to Valstagna to open up the quarry—­una montagna