I speak of Donatello elsewhere in this book,[92] but you will find one of his best works among much curious, interesting litter from the Duomo in the Opera del Duomo, the Cathedral Museum in the old Falconieri Palace just behind the apse of the Cathedral.  A bust of Cosimo Primo stands over the entrance, and within you find a beautiful head of Brunellesco by Buggiano.  It is, however, in a room on the first floor that you will find the great organ lofts, one by Donatello and the other by Luca della Robbia, which I suppose are among the best known works of art in the world.  Made for the Cathedral, these galleries for singers seem to be imprisoned in a museum.

The beautiful youths of Luca, the children of Donatello, for all their seeming vigour and joy, sing and dance no more; they are in as evil a case as the Madonnas of the Uffizi, who, in their golden frames behind the glass, under the vulgar, indifferent eyes of the multitude, envy Madonna of the street-corner the love of the lowly.  So it is with the beautiful Cantorie made for God’s praise by Donatello and Luca della Robbia.  Before the weary eyes of the sight-seer, the cold eyes of the scientific critic, in the horrid silence of a museum, amid so much that is dead, here the headless trunk of some saint, there the battered fragments of what was once a statue, some shadow has fallen upon them, and though they keep still the gesture of joy, they are really dead or sleeping.  Is it only sleep?  Do they perhaps at night, when all the doors of their prisons are barred and their gaolers are gone, praise God in His Holiness, even in such a hell as this?  Who knows?  They were made for a world so different, for a time that out of the love of God had seen arise the very beauty of the world, and were glad therefor.  Ah, of how many beautiful things have we robbed God in our beggary!  We have imprisoned the praise of the artists in the museums that Science may pass by and sneer; we have arranged the saints in order, and Madonna we have carefully hidden under the glass, because now we never dream of God or speak with Him at all.  Art is dying, Beauty is become a burden, Nature a thing for science and not for love.  They are become too precious, the old immortal things; we must hide them away lest they fade and God take them from us:  and because we have hidden them away, and they are become too precious for life, and we have killed them because we loved them, we seldom pass by where they are save to satisfy the same curiosity that leads us to any other charnel-house where the dead are exposed.

[Illustration:  SINGING BOYS FROM THE CANTORIA OF LUCA DELLA ROBBIA

In Opera del Duomo, Florence

Alinari]