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Christ on the Cross Frontispiece
Joshua To face page 10
Poggio " 12
Mocenigo Tomb " 14
Marble David " 16
St. John the Evangelist " 18
Jeremiah " 20
Habakkuk " 24
The Zuccone " 26
Abraham and Isaac " 30
St. Mark " 36
St. George " 40
St. George " 42
Annunciation " 48
San Giovannino " 56
St. John Baptist, Marble " 58
Clay Sketch of Crucifixion and Flagellation " 62
Niche of Or San Michele " 64
The Marzocco " 66
The Martelli Shield " 68
Salome Relief, Siena " 70
Tomb of Coscia, Pope John XXIII. " 72
Effigy of Pope John XXIII. " 74
Tomb of Cardinal Brancacci " 78
Tomb Plate of Bishop Pecci " 86
Tabernacle " 94
The Charge to Peter " 96
The Bronze David " 100
Cantoria " 106
Cantoria (Detail) " 108
The Prato Pulpit " 110
Bronze Amorino " 114
San Giovannino " 118
Niccolo da Uzzano " 122
Bronze Doors " 136
Judith " 140
St. Mary Magdalen " 144
St. John the Baptist " 146
Saint Francis, the Madonna, and Saint
Anthony
" 152
Miracle of the Speaking Babe " 156
Miracle of the Miser’s Heart " 158
Miracle of the Mule " 160
Symbol of St. Matthew " 162
Choristers " 164
Choristers " 164
Christ Mourned by Angels " 166
Super Altar by Giovanni da Pisa " 168
Tomb of Giovanni, Son of General Gattamelata " 170
Tomb of General Gattamelata " 172
Shrine of St. Justina " 172
General Gattamelata " 174
Colleone " 176
Madonna and Child " 180
“Pazzi” Madonna " 182
Madonna and Child " 184
Madonna " 186
Side Panel of Pulpit " 188
End Panel of Pulpit " 190
The reproductions
from photographs which illustrate this
volume have been made
by Messrs. J.J. Waddington, Ltd. 14
Henrietta Street, W.C.
The materials for a biography of Donatello are so scanty, that his life and personality can only be studied in his works. The Renaissance gave birth to few men of productive genius whose actual careers are so little known. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Donatello composed no treatise on his art; he wrote no memoir or commentary, no sonnets, and indeed scarcely a letter of his even on business topics has survived. For specific information about his career we therefore depend upon some returns made to the Florentine tax-collectors, and upon a number of contracts and payments for work carried out in various parts of Italy. But, however familiar Donatello the sculptor may be to the student of Italian art, Donatello the man must remain a mystery. His biography offers no attraction for those whose curiosity requires minute and intimate details of domestic life. Donatello bequeathed nothing to posterity except a name, his masterpieces and a lasting influence for good.
The Denunzia de’ beni, which was periodically demanded from Florentine citizens, was a declaration of income combined with what would now be called census returns. Donatello made three statements of this nature,[1] in 1427, 1433 and 1457. It is difficult to determine his age, as in each case the date of his birth is differently inferred. But it is probable that the second of these returns, when he said that he was forty-seven years old, gives his correct age. This would place his birth in 1386, and various deductions from other sources justify this attribution. We gather also that Donatello lived with his mother Orsa, his father having died before 1415. The widow, who is mentioned in 1427, and not in 1433, presumably died before the latter date. One sister, Tita, a dowerless widow, is mentioned in the earliest denunzia, living with her mother and Donatello, her son Giuliano having been born in 1409. It is probable that Donatello had a brother, but the matter is somewhat obscure, and it is now certain that he cannot be identified with the sculptor Simone, who used to be considered Donatello’s brother on the authority of Vasari.
[Footnote 1: Gaye, Carteggio, i. 120. See Appendix ii. A.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Competition for the Baptistery Gates.]
The year 1402 marks an event of far-reaching importance in the history of Italian art. Having decided to erect bronze doors for their Baptistery, the Florentines invited all artists to submit competitive designs. After a preliminary trial, six artists were selected and a further test was imposed. They were directed to make a bronze relief of given size and shape, the subject being the Sacrifice of Isaac. Few themes could have been better chosen, as the artist had to show his capacity to portray youth and age, draped and undraped figures, as well as landscape and animal life. The trial plaques were to be sent to the judges within twelve months. Donatello did not compete, being only a boy, but he must have been familiar with every stage in the contest, which excited the deepest interest in Tuscany. A jury of thirty-four experts, among whom were goldsmiths and painters as well as sculptors, assembled to deliver the final verdict. The work of Jacobo della Quercia of Siena was lacking in elegance and delicacy; the design submitted by Simone da Colle was marred by faulty drawing; that of Niccolo d’Arezzo by badly proportioned figures; while Francesco di Valdambrino made a confused and inharmonious group. It was evident that Ghiberti and Brunellesco were the most able competitors, and the jury hesitated before giving a decision. Brunellesco, however, withdrew in favour of his younger rival, and the commission was accordingly entrusted to Ghiberti. The decision was wise: Ghiberti’s model, technically as well as aesthetically, was superior to that of Brunellesco. Both are preserved at Florence, and nobody has regretted the acceptance of Ghiberti’s design, for its rejection would have made a sculptor of Brunellesco, whose real tastes and inclinations were towards architecture, to which he rendered services of incomparable value.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: First Journey to Rome.]
For a short time Donatello was probably one of the numerous garzoni or assistants employed by Ghiberti in making the gates, but his first visit to Rome is the most important incident of his earlier years. Brunellesco, disappointed by his defeat, and wishing to study the sculpture and architecture of Rome, sold a property at Settignano to raise funds for the journey. He was accompanied by Donatello, his stretissimo amico, [Transcriber’s Note: Probably should be “strettissimo.”] and they spent at least a year together in Rome, learning what they could from the existing monuments of ancient art, and making jewelry when money was wanted for their household expenses. Tradition says that they once unearthed a hoard of old coins and were thenceforward known as the treasure-seekers—quelli del’ tesoro. But the influence of antiquity upon Donatello was never great, and Brunellesco had to visit Rome frequently before he could fully realise the true bearings of classical art. It has been argued that Donatello never made this early visit to Rome on the ground that his subsequent work shows no traces of classical influence. On such a problem as this the affirmative statement of Vasari is lightly disregarded. But the biographer of Brunellesco is explicit on the point, giving many details about their sojourn; and this book was written during the lifetime of both Donatello and Brunellesco. The argument against the visit is, in fact, untenable. Artists were influenced by classical motives without going to Rome. Brunellesco himself placed in his competition design a figure inspired by the bronze boy drawing a thorn out of his foot—the Spinario of the Capitol. Similar examples could be quoted from the work of Luca della Robbia, and it would be easy to show, on the other hand, that painters like Masaccio, Fra Angelico, and Piero della Francesca were able to execute important work in Rome without allowing themselves to be influenced by the classical spirit except in details and accessories. Moreover, if one desired to press the matter further, it can be shown that in the work completed by Donatello before 1433, the year in which he made his second and undisputed visit, there are sufficient signs of classical motive in his architectural backgrounds to justify the opinion that he was acquainted with the ancient buildings of Rome. The Relief on the font at Siena and that in the Musee Wicar at Lille certainly show classical study. At the same time, in measuring the extent to which Donatello was influenced by his first visit to Rome, we must remember that it is often difficult and sometimes impossible to determine the source of what is generically called classical. The revival or reproduction of Romanesque motives is often mistaken for classical research. In the places where Christianity had little classical architecture to guide it—Ravenna, for instance—a
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Predecessors of Donatello.]
Florence was busily engaged in decorating her great buildings. The fourteenth century had witnessed the structural completion of the Cathedral, excepting its dome, of the Campanile, and of the Church of Or San Michele. During the later years of the century their adornment was begun. A host of sculptors was employed, the number and scale of statues required being great. There was a danger that the sculpture might have become a mere handmaid of the architecture to which it was subordinated. But this was not the case; the sculptors preserved a freedom in adapting their figures to the existing architectural lines, and it is precisely in the statuary applied to completed buildings that we can trace the most interesting transitions from Gothic to Renaissance. It is needless to discuss closely the work which was erected before Donatello’s return from Rome: much of it has unhappily perished, and what remains is for the purposes of this book merely illustrative of the early inspiration of Donatello. Piero Tedesco made a number of statues for the Cathedral, Mea and Giottino worked for the Campanile. Lorenzo di Bicci, sculptor, architect, and painter, was one of those whose influence extended to Donatello; Niccolo d’Arezzo was perhaps the most original of this group, making a genuine effort to shake off the conventional system. But, on the whole, the last quarter of the fourteenth century showed but little progress. Indeed, from the time of the later Pisani there seems to have been a period of stagnation, a pause during which the anticipated progress bore little fruit. Orcagna never succeeded in developing the ideas of his master. The shrine in Or San Michele, marvellous in its way, admirable alike for diligence and sincerity, stands alone, and was not imbued with the life which could make it an influence upon contemporary art.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: First Work for the Cathedral.]
The first recorded payment to Donatello by the Domopera, or Cathedral authorities, was made in November 1406, when he received ten golden florins as an instalment towards his work on the two prophets for the North door of the church, which is rather inaccurately described in the early documents as facing the Via de’ Servi. Fifteen months later he received the balance of six florins. These two marble figures, small as they are, and placed high above the gables, are not very noticeable, but they contain the germ of much which was to follow. The term “prophet” can only be applied to them by courtesy, for they are curly-haired boys with free and open countenances; one of them happens to hold a scroll and the other wears a chaplet of bay leaves. There is a certain charm about them, a freshness and vitality which reappears later on when Donatello was making the dancing children for the Prato pulpit and the singing gallery for the Cathedral. The two prophets, particularly the one to the right, are clothed with a skill and facility all the more remarkable from the fact that some of the statues made soon afterwards, show a stiff and rigid treatment of drapery. Closely allied to these figures is a small marble statue, about three feet high, belonging to Madame Edouard Andre in Paris. It is a full-length figure of a standing youth, modelled with precision, and intended to be placed in a niche or against a background. Like the prophets just described, it has a high forehead, while the drapery falls in strong harmonious lines, a corner being looped up over the left arm. It is undoubtedly by Donatello, being the earliest example of his work in any collection, public or private, and on that account of importance, apart from its intrinsic merits.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Cathedral Facade.]
Donatello soon received commissions for statues of a more imposing scale to be placed on the ill-fated facade of the Cathedral. All beautiful within, the churches of Florence are singularly poor in those rich facades which give such scope to the sculptor and architect, conferring, as at Pisa, distinction on a whole town. The churches of the Carmine, Santo Spirito and San Lorenzo are without facades at all, presenting graceless and unfinished masonry in place of what was intended by their founders. Elsewhere there are late and florid facades alien to the spirit of the main building, while it has been left to our own generation to complete Santa Croce and the Cathedral. The latter, it is true, once had a facade, which, though never finished, was ambitiously planned. A large section of it was, however, erected in Donatello’s time, but was removed for no reason which can be adequately explained, except that on the occasion of a royal marriage it was thought necessary to destroy what was contrived in the maniera tedesca, substituting a sham painted affair which was speedily ruined by the elements. The ethics
[Footnote 2: Cinelli, p. 22.]
[Footnote 3: 23, xii. 1418.]
[Footnote 4: 12, xii. 1408.]
[Footnote 5: 30, v. 1421.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
CATHEDRAL, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: The Daniel and Poggio.]
Nine large marble figures for the Cathedral are now accepted as the work of Donatello. Others may have perished, and it is quite possible that in one at least of the other statues Donatello may have had a considerable share. With the exception of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, all these statues are derived from the Old Testament—Daniel, Jeremiah and Habbakuk, Abraham and the marble David in the Bargello, together with the two figures popularly called Poggio and the Zuccone. Among the earliest, and, it must be acknowledged, the least interesting of these statues is the prophet standing in a niche in the south aisle close to the great western door of the Cathedral. It has been long recognised as a Donatello,[6] and has been called Joshua. But, apart from the fact that he holds the scroll of a prophet, whereas one would rather expect Joshua to carry a sword, this statue is so closely related to the little prophets of the Mandorla door that it is almost certainly coeval with them, and consequently anterior in date to the period of the Joshua for which Donatello was paid some years later. We find the same broad flow of drapery, and the weight of the body is thrown on to one hip in a pronounced manner, which is certainly ungraceful, though typical of Donatello’s early ideas of balance. It probably represents Daniel. He has the high forehead, the thick curly hair and the youthful appearance of the other prophets, while his “countenance appears fairer and fatter in flesh,"[7] reminding one of Michael Angelo’s treatment of the same theme in the Sistine Chapel.
[Footnote 6: Osservatore Fiorentino, 1797, 3rd ed., iv. 216.]
[Footnote 7: Daniel i. 15.]
Like several of Donatello’s statues, this figure is connected with the name of a Florentine citizen, Giannozzo Manetti, and passes for his portrait. There is no authority for the tradition, and Vespasiano de’ Bisticci makes no reference to the subject in his life of Manetti. The statue is, no doubt, a portrait and may well have resembled Manetti, but in order to have been directly executed as a portrait it could scarcely have been made before 1426, when Manetti was thirty years old, by which date the character of Donatello’s work had greatly changed. These traditional names have caused many critical difficulties, as, when accepted as authentic, the obvious date of the statue has been arbitrarily altered, so that the statue may harmonise in point of date of execution with the apparent age of the individual whom it is supposed to portray. A second example of the confusion caused by the over-ready acceptance of these nomenclatures is afforded by the remarkable figure which stands in the north aisle of the Cathedral, opposite the Daniel. This statue has been called a portrait of Poggio Bracciolini, the secretary of many Popes. Poggio was born in 1380 and passed some time in Florence during the year 1456. It has, therefore, been assumed[8] that the statue was made at this time or shortly afterwards, either as Donatello’s tribute of friendship to Poggio or as an order from the Cathedral authorities in his commemoration. This theory is wholly untenable. We have no record of any such work in 1456. The statue does not portray a man seventy-six years old. Distinguished as Poggio was, his nature did not endear him greatly to the Florentine churchmen; and, finally, the style of the sculpture predicates its execution between 1420 and 1430. We can, of course, admit that Poggio’s features may have been recognised in the statue, and that it soon came to be considered his portrait. In any case, however, we are dealing with a portrait-statue. The keen and almost cynical face, with its deep and powerful lines, is certainly no creation of the fancy, but the study of somebody whom Donatello knew. It is true there are contradictions in the physiognomy: sarcasm and benevolence alternate, as the dominating expression of the man’s character. The whole face is marked by the refinement of one from whom precision and niceness of judgment would be expected. It is not altogether what Poggio’s achievements would lead one to expect; neither is it of a type which, as has been suggested, would allow us to call it the missing Joshua. The idea that Job may be the subject is too ingenious to receive more than a passing reference.[9]
[Footnote 8: Semper, I., p. 132.]
[Footnote 9: Schmarsow, p. 10.]
[Illustration: Alinari
CATHEDRAL, FLORENCE]
There is one detail in the statue of Poggio which raises a problem familiar to students of fifteenth-century art, especially frequent in paintings of the Madonna, namely, the cryptic lettering to be found on the borders of garments. In the case of Poggio, the hem of the tunic just below the throat is incised with deep and clear cyphers which cannot be read as a name or initials. Many cases could be quoted to illustrate the practice of giving only the first letters of words forming a sentence.[10] In this case the script is not Arabic, as on Verrocchio’s David. The lettering on the Poggio, as on Donatello’s tomb of Bishop Pecci at Siena and elsewhere, has not been satisfactorily explained. Even if painters were in the habit of putting conventional symbols on their pictures in the form of inscriptions, it is not likely that this careful and elaborate carving should be meaningless. The solution may possibly be found in Vettorio Ghiberti’s drawing of a bell, the rim of which is covered with similar hieroglyphics. The artist has transcribed in plain writing a pleasant Latin motto which one may presume to be the subject of the inscription. If this were accurately deciphered a clue might be found to unravel this obscure problem.[11]
[Footnote 10: The conclusion of Dello’s epitaph, as recorded by Vasari, is H.S.E.S.T.T.L.—i.e., Hic sepultus est, sit tibi terra levis. The bas-relief of Faith in the Bargello is signed O.M.C.L., i.e., Opus Mattaei Civitali Lucensis. There is a manuscript of St. Jerome in the Rylands Library at Manchester in which long texts are quoted by means of the initial letters alone.]
[Footnote 11: MS. Sketch-Book in Bibl. Naz., Florence, lettered “Ghiberti,” folio 51a.]
[Illustration: Alinari
SAN GIOVANNI E PAOLO, VENICE]
Closely analogous to the statue which we must continue to call Poggio is a striking figure of Justice surmounting the tomb of Tommaso Mocenigo in the Church of San Giovanni e Paolo at Venice. Mocenigo died in 1423, and the tomb was made by two indifferent Florentine artists, whose poor and imitative work must be referred to later on in connection with the St. George. But the Justice, a vigorous and original figure, holding a scroll and looking downwards, so absolutely resembles the Poggio in conception, attitude, and fall of drapery, that the authorship must be referred to Donatello himself. It is certainly no copy. One cannot say how this isolated piece of Donatello’s work should have found its way to Venice, although by 1423 Donatello’s reputation had secured him commissions for Orvieto and Ancona and Siena. But it is not necessary to suppose that this Justice was made to order for the Mocenigo tomb; had it remained in Florence it would have been long since accepted as a genuine example of the master.
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
CATHEDRAL, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: St. John the Evangelist and the marble David.]
The third great statue made for the facade by Donatello is now placed in a dark apsidal chapel, where the light is so bad that the figure is often invisible. This is the statue of St. John the Evangelist, and is much earlier than Poggio, having been ordered on December 12, 1408. Two evangelists were to be placed on either side of the central door. Nanni di Banco was to make St. Luke, Niccolo d’Arezzo St. Mark, and it was intended that the fourth figure should be entrusted to the most successful of the three sculptors; but in the following year the Domopera changed their plan, giving the commission for St. Matthew to Bernardo Ciuffagni, a sculptor somewhat older than Donatello. Ciuffagni was not unpopular as an artist, for he received plenty of work in various parts of Italy; but he was a man of mediocre talent, neither archaic nor progressive, making occasional failures and exercising little influence for good or ill upon those with whom he came in contact. He has, however, one valued merit, that of being a man about whom we have a good deal of documentary information. Donatello worked on the St. John for nearly seven years, and, according to custom, was under obligation to complete the work within a specified time. Penalty clauses used to be enforced in those days. Jacopo della Quercia ran the danger of imprisonment for neglecting the commands of Siena. Torrigiano having escaped from England was recalled by the help of Ricasoli, the Florentine resident in London, and was fortunate to avoid punishment. Donatello finished his statue in time, and received his final instalment in 1415, the year in which the figures were set up beside the great Porch. This evangelist, begun when Donatello was twenty-two and completed before his thirtieth year, challenges comparison with one worthy rival, the Moses of Michael Angelo. The Moses was the outcome of many years of intermittent labour, and was created by the help of all the advances made by sculpture during a century of progress. Yet in one respect only can Michael Angelo claim supremacy. Hitherto Donatello had made nothing but standing figures. The St. John sits; he is almost inert, and does not seem to await the divine message. But how superb it is, this majestic calm and solemnity; how Donatello triumphs over the lack of giving tension to what is quiescent! The Penseroso also sits and meditates, but every muscle of the reposing limbs is alert. So, too, in the Moses, with all its exaggeration and melodrama, with its aspect of frigid sensationalism, which led Thackeray to say he would not like to be left alone in the room with it, we find every motionless limb imbued with vitality and the essentials of movement. The Moses undoubtedly springs from the St. John, transcending it as Beethoven surpassed Haydn. In spite of nearly unpardonable faults verging on decadence, it is the greater though the less pleasing creation of the two. The St. John surveys the world; the Moses speaks with God.
[Illustration: Alinari
BARGELLO, FLORENCE]
The fourth statue made for the Cathedral proper is contemporary with the St. John. The marble David, ordered in 1408 and completed in 1416, was destined for a chapel inside the church. The Town Commissioners, however, sent a somewhat peremptory letter to the Domopera and the statue was handed over to them. It was placed in the great hall of the Palace, was ultimately removed to the Uffizzi, and is now in the Bargello Museum. The David certainly has a secular look. This ruddy youth of a fair countenance, crowned with a wreath, stands in an attitude which is shy and perhaps awkward, and by his feet lies the head of Goliath with the smooth stone from the brook deeply embedded in his forehead. The drapery of the tunic is close fitting, moulded exactly to the lines of his frame, and above it a loose cloak hangs over the shoulders and falls to the ground with a corner of cloth looped over one of the wrists in a familiar way.[12] It would be idle to pretend that the David is a marked success like the St. John. It neither attains an ideal, as in the St. George, nor is it a profound interpretation of character like the Habbakuk or Jeremiah. Its effect is impaired by this sense of compromise and uncertainty. It is one of the very rare cases in which Donatello hesitated between divergent aims and finally translated his doubts into marble.
[Footnote 12: Cf. Madame Andre’s prophet and figures on Mandorla door.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Statues of the Campanile.]
We must now refer to a group of statues which adorn the Campanile, the great Bell tower designed by Giotto for the Cathedral. Not counting the numerous reliefs, there are sixteen statues in all, four on each side of the tower, and in themselves they epitomise early Florentine sculpture. Donatello’s statues of Jeremiah, Abraham, and St. John the Baptist offer no difficulties of nomenclature, but the Zuccone and the Habbakuk are so called on hypothetical grounds. The Zuccone has been called by this familiar nickname from time immemorial: bald-head or pumpkin—such is the meaning of the word, and nobody has hitherto given a reasoned argument to identify this singular figure with any particular prophet. As early as 1415 Donatello received payment for some of this work, and the latest record on the subject is dated 1435. We may therefore expect to find some variety in idea and considerable development in technique during these twenty years. Donatello was not altogether single-handed. It is certain that by the time these numerous works were being executed he was assisted by scholars, and the Abraham was actually made in collaboration with Giovanni di Bartolo, surnamed Il Rosso. It is not easy to discriminate between the respective shares of the partners. Giovanni was one of those men whose style varied with the dominating
[Footnote 13: On the Brenzoni tomb in the Church of San Fermo: “Quem genuit Russi Florentia Tusca Johanis: istud sculpsit opus ingeniosa manus.”]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: St. John the Baptist.]
Rosso does not compare favourably with Donatello. Obadiah is less attractive than St. John the Baptist, its pendant. The test is admittedly severe, for the St. John is a figure remarkable alike in conception and for its technical skill. Were it not for the scroll bearing the “Ecce Agnus Dei,” we should not suggest St. John as the subject. Donatello made many Baptists—boys, striplings and men young and mature: but in this case only have we something bright and cheerful. He is no mystic; he differs fundamentally from the gloomy ascetic and the haggard suffering figures in Siena and Berlin. So far from being morose in appearance, clad in raiment of camel’s hair, fed upon locusts and wild honey, and summoning the land of Judaea to repent, we have a vigorous young Tuscan, well dressed and well fed, standing in an easy and graceful attitude and not without a tinge of pride in the handsome countenance. In short, the statue is by no means typical of the Saint. It would more aptly represent some romantic knight of chivalry, a Victor, a Maurice—even a St. George. It competes with Donatello’s own version of St. George. In all essentials they are alike, and the actual figures are identical in gesture and pose, disregarding shield and armour in one case, scroll and drapery in the other. The two figures are so analogous, that as studies from the nude they would be almost indistinguishable. They differ in this: that the Saint on the Campanile is John the Baptist merely because we are told so, while the figure made for Or San Michele is inevitably the soldier saint of Christendom. It must not be inferred that the success of plastic, skill less that of pictorial, art depends upon the accuracy or vividness with which the presentment “tells its story.” Under such a criterion the most popular work of art would necessarily bear the palm of supremacy. But there should be some relation between the statue and the subject-matter. Nobody knew this better than Donatello: he seldom incurred
[Footnote 14: Pliny, xxxiv. 19, 3.]
[Footnote 15: Bargello David.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
CAMPANILE, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: Jeremiah and the Canon of Art.]
The Jeremiah, for instance, which is in the niche adjacent to the still more astonishing Zuccone (looking westwards towards the Baptistery), is a portrait study of consummate power. It is the very man who wrote the sin of Judah with a pen of iron, the man who was warned not to be dismayed at the faces of those upon whose folly he poured the vials of anger and scorn; he is emphatically one of those who would scourge the vices of his age. And yet this Jeremiah has his human aspect. The strong jaw and tightly closed lips show a decision which might turn to obstinacy; but the brow overhangs eyes which are full of sympathy, bearing an expression of sorrow and gentleness such as one expects from the man who wept for the miserable estate of Jerusalem—Quomodo sedet sola civitas!
Tradition says that this prophet is a portrait of Francesco Soderini, the opponent of the Medici; while the Zuccone is supposed to be the portrait of Barduccio Cherichini, another anti-Medicean partisan. Probabilities apart, much could be urged against the attributions, which are really on a par with the similar nomenclatures of Manetti and Poggio. The important thing is that they are undoubted portraits, their identity being of secondary interest; the fact that a portrait was made at all is of far greater moment to the history of art. Later on, Savonarola (whose only contribution to art was an unconscious inspiration of the charming woodcuts with which his sermons and homilies were illustrated) protested warmly against the prevailing habit of giving Magdalen and the Baptist the features of living and well-known townsfolk.[16] The practice had, no doubt, led to scandal. But with Donatello it marks an early stage in emancipation from the bondage of conventionalism. Not, indeed, that Donatello was the absolute innovator in this direction, though it is to his efforts that the change became irresistible. Thus in these portrait-prophets we find the proof
[Footnote 16: In 1496. See Gruyer, “Les Illustrations,” 1879, p. 206.]
[Footnote 17: C. Mueller, “Ancient Art and its Remains,” p. 227.]
[Footnote 18: Pliny, xxxvi. 44.]
[Footnote 19: Printed in Richter’s “Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci,” vol. i.]
[Footnote 20: By Francis Grose, the Antiquary. London, 1788.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
CAMPANILE, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: Habbakuk and the Sense of Distance.]
We do not know much about Habbakuk. He left two or three pages of passionate complaint against the iniquity of the land, but his “burden” lacks those outbursts of lyric poetry which are found in most of the other minor prophets. Donatello gives him the air of a thinker. He holds a long scroll to which he points with his right hand while looking downward, towards the door of the Cathedral. It is a strong head, as full of character as the Jeremiah. But Habbakuk is less the man of action, and the deep lines about the mouth and across the forehead show rather the fruits of contemplation. There may be a note of scepticism in the face. But this Habbakuk is no ascetic, and there is much strength in reserve: his comment though acrid would be just. The veins in the throat stand out like cords. They are much more noticeable in the photograph than when one sees the statue from the Piazza. It must be remembered that these figures on the Campanile are something like fifty-five feet from the ground: they were made for these lofty positions, and were carved accordingly. They show Donatello’s sense of distance; the Zuccone shows his sense of light and shade, the Abraham his sense of proportion. Donatello had the advantage of making these figures for particular places; his sculpture was eminently adapted to the conditions under which it was to be seen. In the vast majority of cases modern sculpture is made for undetermined positions, and is fortunate if it obtains a suitable emplacement. It seldom gets distance, light and proportion in harmony with the technical character of the carving. Donatello
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
CAMPANILE, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: The Zuccone, “Realism” and Nature.]
The Zuccone is one of the eternal mysteries of Italian art. What can have been Donatello’s intention? Why give such prominence to this graceless type? Baldinucci called it St. Mark.[21] Others have been misled by the lettering on the plinth below the statue “David Rex”: beneath the Jeremiah is “Salomon Rex."[22] These inscriptions belonged, of course, to the kings which made way for Donatello’s
[Footnote 21: Edition 1768, p. 74.]
[Footnote 22: E.g., Milanesi, Catalogo, 1887, p. 6.]
[Footnote 23: Cinelli’s edition, 1677, p. 45.]
[Footnote 24: Raffaelle Mengs, Collected Works. London, 1796, I., p. 132.]
[Footnote 25: Printed in Vasari, Lemonnier Ed., 1846, vol. i.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Zuccone and the Sense of Light and Shade.]
Speaking of the employment of light and shade as instruments in art, Cicero says: “Multa vident pictores in umbris et in eminentia, quae nos non videmus.” One may apply the dictum to the Zuccone where Donatello has carved the head with a rugged boldness, leaving the play of light and shade to complete the portrait. Davanzati was explicit on the matter,[26] showing that the point of view from which the Zuccone was visible made this coarse treatment imperative, if the
[Footnote 26: In Introduction to his translation of Tacitus.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
CAMPANILE, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: Abraham and the Sense of Proportion.]
The statue of Abraham and Isaac on the east side of the Campanile is interesting as being the first group made by Donatello. The subject had already been treated by Brunellesco and Ghiberti in relief. Donatello had to make his figures on a larger scale. Abraham is a tall, powerful man with a long flowing beard, looking upwards as he receives the command to sheath the dagger already touching the shoulder of his son. The naked boy is kneeling on his left leg and is modelled with a good deal of skill, though, broadly speaking, the treatment is rather archaic in character. It is a tragic scene, in which the contrast of the inexorable father and the resigned son is admirably felt. Donatello had to surmount a technical difficulty, that of putting two figures into a niche only intended for one. His sense of proportion enabled him to make a group in harmony with its position and environment. It fits the niche. Statues are so often unsuited to their niches; scores of examples could be quoted from Milan Cathedral alone where the figures are too big or too small, or where the base slopes downwards and thus fails to give adequate support to the figure. There is an old tradition which illustrates Donatello’s aptitude for grouping. Nanni di Banco had to put four martyrs into a niche of Or San Michele, and having made his statues found it impossible to get them in. Donatello was invoked, and by removing a superfluous bit of marble here, and knocking off an arm there, the four figures were successfully grouped together. The statues, it must be admitted, show no signs of such usage, and Nanni was a competent person: but the story would not have been invented unless Donatello
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Drapery and Hands.]
Rosso’s drapery was apt to be treated in rather a small way with a number of little folds. Donatello, on the other hand, often tended to the opposite extreme, and in the Campanile figures we see the clothes hanging about the prophets in such ample lines that the Zuccone and Jeremiah are overweighted with togas which look like heavy blankets. Habbakuk and the Baptist are much more skilfully draped, deference being shown to the anatomy. “To make drapery merely natural,” said Sir Joshua Reynolds, “is a mechanical operation to which neither genius nor taste are required: whereas it requires the nicest judgment to dispose the drapery so that the folds have an easy communication, and gracefully follow each other with such natural negligence as to look like the effect of chance, and at the same time show the figure under it to the utmost advantage."[27] The sculptors of the fifteenth century did not find it so easy to make drapery look purely natural, and we are often confronted by cases where they failed in this respect. It arose partly from a belief that drapery was nothing more than an accessory, partly also from their ignorance of what was so fully realised by the Greeks, that there can be very little grace in a draped figure unless there are the elements of beauty below. Another comment suggested by Donatello’s early work in marble is that he was not quite certain how to model or dispose the hands. They are often unduly big; Michael Angelo started with the same mistake: witness his David and the Madonna on the Stairs. It was a mistake soon rectified in either case. But till late in life Donatello never quite succeeded in giving nerve or occupation to his hands. St. Mark, St. Peter, and St. John all have a book in their left hands, but none of them hold the book; it has no weight, the hand shows no grip and has no sense of possession. Neither did Donatello always know where to put the hands, giving them the shy and
[Footnote 27: Discourses, 1778, p. 116.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Minor Works for the Cathedral.]
There remain a few minor works for the Cathedral which require notice. In October 1421 an unfinished figure by Ciuffagni was handed over to Donatello and Il Rosso. It is probable that Dr. Semper is correct in thinking that this may be the statue on the East side of the Cathedral hitherto ascribed to Niccolo d’Arezzo, though it can hardly be the missing Joshua. We have here a middle-aged man with a long beard, his head inclined forward and supported by his upraised hand with its forefinger extended. Donatello was fond of youth, but not less of middle age. With all their power these prophets are middle-aged men who would walk slowly and whose gesture would be fraught with mature dignity. Donatello did not limit to the very young or the very old the privilege of seeing visions and dreaming dreams. Two other statues by Donatello have perished. These are Colossi,[28] ordered probably between 1420 and 1425, and made of brick covered with stucco or some other kind of plaster. They stood outside the church, on the buttress pillars between the apsidal chapels. One of them was on the north side, as an early description mentions the “Gigante sopra la Annuntiata,"[29] that is above the Annunciation on the Mandorla door. The perishable material of these statues was selected, no doubt, owing to the difficulty and expense of securing huge monoliths of marble. In this case one must regret their loss, as the distance from which they
[Footnote 28: They were standing as late as 1768. Baldinucci, p. 79.]
[Footnote 29: Memoriale, 1510.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
OR SAN MICHELE]
[Sidenote: Or San Michele, St. Peter and St. Mark.]
From the earliest times there used to be a church dedicated to St. Michael, which stood within the orto, the garden named after the saint. The church was, however, removed in the thirteenth century and was replaced by an open loggia, which was used for a corn market and store. In the following century the open arches of the loggia were built up, again making a church of the building, in which a venerated Madonna, for which Orcagna made the tabernacle, was preserved. The companies and merchant guilds of Florence undertook to present statues to decorate the external niches of the building. Besides Donatello, Ghiberti, Verrocchio, Gian Bologna and Nanni di Banco were employed; and there are also some admirable medallions by Luca della Robbia. Donatello made four statues—St. Peter, St. Mark, St. Louis and St. George. He was to have made St. Phillip as well, but the shoemakers who ordered the statue could not afford to pay Donatello’s price and the work was entrusted to Nanni di Banco. Two only of Donatello’s statues are left at Or San Michele, the St. Louis being now in Santa Croce, while the St. George has been placed in the Bargello. All these statues were put into niches of which the base is not more than eight feet from the ground, and being intended to be seen at a short distance are carved with greater attention to detail and finish than is the case with the prophets on the Campanile. St. Peter is probably the earliest in date, having been made, judging from stylistic grounds, between 1407 and 1412. This statue shows a doubt and hesitation which did not affect Donatello when making the little prophets for the Mandorla door. The head is commonplace and inexpressive; the pose is dull, and the drapery with its crimped edges ignores the right leg. There is, however, nothing blameworthy in the statue, but, on the other hand, there is nothing showing promise or deserving praise. Had it been made by one of the macchinisti of the time it would have lived in decent obscurity without provoking comment. In fact the statue does not owe its appearance in critical discussions to its own merits, but to the later achievement of the sculptor. Thus only can one explain Bocchi’s opinion that “living man could not display truer deportment than we find in the St. Peter."[30] One of the figures from the Cathedral facade now in the Louvre, an apostle or doctor of the Church, shows whence Donatello derived his prosy idea, though the St. Peter is treated in a less archaic manner. The St. Mark is much more successful: there is conviction as well as vigour and greater skill. Michael Angelo exclaimed that nobody could disbelieve the Gospel when preached by a saint whose countenance is honesty itself. The very drapery—il prudente costume e religioso—[31] was held to contribute to Michael Angelo’s praise. The grave and kindly face, devout and holy,[32] together with a certain homeliness of attitude, give the St. Mark a
[Footnote 30: Cinelli ed., p. 66.]
[Footnote 31: Bocchi, 1765 ed., p. 128.]
[Footnote 32: Spira il volto divozione e Santita, Cinelli, p. 66.]
[Footnote 33: Gualandi, “Memorie,” Series 4, p. 106.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: St. Louis.]
The St. Louis is made of bronze. The reputation of this admirable figure has been prejudiced by a ridiculous bit of gossip seriously recorded by Vasari, to the effect that, having been reproached for making a clumsy figure, Donatello replied that he had done so with set purpose to mark the folly of the man who exchanged the crown for a friar’s habit. Vasari had to enliven his biographies by anecdotes, and their authenticity was not always without reproach. In view of his immense services to the history of art one will gladly forgive these pleasantries; but it is deplorable when they are solemnly quoted as infallible. One author says: “... impossibile a guardare quel goffo e disgraziato San Lodovico senza sentire una stretta al cuore.” This is preposterous. The statue has faults, but they do not spring from organic error. The Bishop is overweighted with his thick vestments, and his mitre is rather too broad for the head; the left hand, moreover, is big and Donatellesque. But the statue, now placed high above the great door of Santa Croce, is seen under most unfavourable conditions, and would look infinitely better in the low niche of Or San Michele. Its proportions would then appear less
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
IN NICHE ON OR SAN MICHELE]
[Sidenote: St. George.]
The St. George is the most famous of Donatello’s statues, and is generally called his masterpiece. The marble original has now been taken into the Museum, and a bronze cast replaces it at Or San Michele. The cause of this transfer is understood to be a fear that the statue would be ruined by exposure, although one would think that this would apply still more to the exquisite relief, which remains in situ, though unprotected by the niche. In the side-lighted Bargello, the St. George is crowded into a shallow niche (with plenty of highly correct detail) and is seen to the utmost disadvantage; but no incongruity of surroundings, no false relations of light can destroy the profound impression left by this statue, which was probably completed about 1416, in Donatello’s thirtieth year. Vasari was enthusiastic in its praise. Bocchi wrote a whole book about it,[34] in which we might expect to find valuable information; but the interest of this ecstatic eulogy is limited. Bocchi gives no dates, facts or authorities; nothing to which modern students can turn for accurate or specific knowledge of Donatello. Cinelli says the St. George was held equal to the rarest sculpture of Rome,[35] and well it might be. The St. George was made for the Guild of Armourers; he is, of course, wearing armour, and the armour fits him, clothes him. It is not the clumsy inelastic stuff which must have prevented so many soldiers from moving a limb or mounting a horse. In this case the lithe and muscular frame is free and full of movement, quite unimpeded
[Footnote 34: “Eccelenza della Statua del San Giorgio di Donatello,” 1571.]
[Footnote 35: Bellezze, 1677, p. 67.]
[Footnote 36: “La Sculpture Florentine,” vol. ii. p. 91.]
[Footnote 37: Victoria and Albert Museum, 7607, 1861.]
[Footnote 38: Uffizzi, frame 49.]
[Footnote 39: Eremitani, Padua, about 1448-50.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
BARGELLO]
[Sidenote: Donatello and Gothic Art.]
The relation of St. George and other Italian works of this period, both in sculpture and painting, to the Gothic art of France cannot be ignored, although no adequate explanation has yet been given. St. George, the Baptists of the Campanile and in Rome, and the marble David are intensely Franco-Gothic, and precisely what one would expect to find in France. The technical and physical resemblance between the two schools may, of course, be a coincidence; it may be purely superficial. But St. Theodore might well take his place outside Or San Michele, while the St. George (in spite of the difference in date) would be in complete ethical harmony with the statues on the portals of Chartres. Even if they cannot be analysed, the phenomena must be stated. Donatello may have spontaneously returned to the principles which underlay the creation of the great statuary of France, the country of all others where a tremendous school had flourished. But what these fundamental principles were it is impossible to determine. It is true there had always been agencies at work which must have familiarised Italy with French thought and ideas. From the time of the dominant French influence in Sicily down to the Papal exile in France—which ended actually while Donatello was working on these statues, one portion or another of the two countries had been frequently brought into contact. The Cistercians, for instance, had been among the most persistent propagators of Gothic architecture in Italy, though nearly all their churches (of which the ground-plans are sometimes identical with those of French buildings) are situated in remote country districts of Italy, and being inaccessible are little known or studied nowadays. France, however, was herself full of Italian teachers and churchmen, who may have brought back Northern ideas of art, for they certainly left small traces of their influence on the French until later on; their presence, at any rate, records intercourse between the two countries. A concrete example of the relation between the two national arts is afforded by the fact that Michelozzo was the son of a Burgundian who settled in Florence. Michelozzo was some years younger than Donatello, and it is therefore quite out of the question to assume that the St. George could have been due to his influence: he was too young to give Donatello more than technical assistance.
[Footnote 40: “Melanges d’Histoire,” p. 248.]
[Footnote 41: Introduction, i. 122.]
[Footnote 42: “Vita de’ Architetti,” 53.]
[Footnote 43: Ibid. 151.]
[Footnote 44: “Discourses,” 1778, p. 237.]
[Footnote 45: “Qua propter si primas et secundarias et subsecundarias vulgaris Ytalie variationes calculare velimus, in hoc minimo mundi angulo, non solum ad millenam loquele variationem venire contigerit, sed etiam at magis ultra.”—De Vulg. Eloq. Lib., I., cap. x. sec. 8.]
[Footnote 46: 23, iv. 1448.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
SANTA CROCE, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: The Crucifix and Annunciation.]
Donatello loved to characterise: in one respect only did he typify. Where there was most character there was often least beauty. This is illustrated by two works in Santa Croce, the Christ on the Cross and the Annunciation. They differ in date, material, and conception, but may be considered together. As to the exact date of the former many opinions have been expressed. Vasari places it about 1401, Manetti about 1405, Schmarsow 1410, Cavalucci 1416, Bode 1431, Marcel Reymond 1430-40. It is quite obvious that the crucifix is the product of rather a timid and uncertain technique, and does not show the verve and decision which Donatello acquired so soon. It is made of olive wood, and is covered by a shiny brown paint which may conceal a good deal of detailed carving. The work is sober and decorous, and not marred by any breach of good taste. It is in no sense remarkable, and has nothing special to connect it with Donatello. Its notoriety springs from a long and rather inconsequent story, which says that, having made his Christ in rivalry with Brunellesco, who was occupied on a similar work, Donatello was so much saddened at the superiority of the other crucifix that he exclaimed: “You make the Christ while I can only make a peasant: a te e conceduto fare i Cristi, ed a me i contadini".[47] Brunellesco’s crucifix,[48] now hidden behind a portentous array of candles, is even less attractive than that in Santa Croce. Brunellesco was the aristocrat, the builder of haughty palaces for haughty men, and may have really thought his cold and correct idea superior to Donatello’s peasant. To have thought of taking a contadino for his type (disappointing as it was to Donatello) was in itself a suggestive and far-reaching departure from the earlier treatment of the subject. In the fourteenth century Christ on the Cross had been treated with more reserve and in a less naturalistic fashion. The traditional idea disappeared after these two Christs, which are among the earliest of their kind, afterwards produced all over Italy in such numbers. As time went on the figure of Christ received more emphasis, until it became the vehicle for exhibiting those painful aspects of death from which no divine message of resurrection could be inferred. The big crucifix ascribed to Michelozzo shows how far exaggeration could be carried.[49] The opened mouth, the piteous expression, the clots of blood falling from the wounds, combine to make a figure which is repellent, and which lost all justification, from the fact that this tortured dying man shows no conviction of divine life to come. Donatello’s bronze crucifix at Padua, made years afterwards, showed that he never forgot that a dying Christ must retain to the last the impress of power and superhuman origin. In the conflict of drama and beauty, Donatello allowed drama to gain the upper hand. But the Annunciation
[Footnote 47: Vasari, iii. 247.]
[Footnote 48: In the Capella Gondi, Santa Maria Novella.]
[Footnote 49: In San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice.]
[Footnote 50: Borghini, Donatello’s earliest work. Semper, 1406. Schmarsow, 1412. Bode, before the second journey to Rome in 1433. Reymond, 1435.]
[Footnote 51: E.g., on the Or San Michele niche, round the Trinity. Verrocchio also used it on his sketch model for the Forteguerri tomb, Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 7599, 1861.]
[Footnote 52: E.g., Pacifico tomb about 1438 and the Francesco Foscari tomb about 1457, both in the Frari.]
[Footnote 53: “Due Trattati di Benvenuto Cellini,” ed. Carlo Milanesi, 1857. Ch. 6 on marble.]
[Footnote 54: Cf. Putti on the Roman Tabernacle.]
[Footnote 55: Bocchi, p. 316.]
[Footnote 56: “Memoriale di molte statue e pitture della citta di Firenze,” 1510.]
[Footnote 57: Or San Michele niche, San Lorenzo Evangelists.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Martelli, David and Donatello’s Technique.]
Tradition says that Ruberto Martelli was the earliest of Donatello’s patrons. So far as we know, there were two Rubertos: the elder was seventy-three at the time of Donatello’s birth, and must therefore have been a nonagenarian before his patronage could be effectively exercised; the other was twenty-two years younger than the sculptor, whom he could not have helped as a young man. But there is no question about the interest shown by the family in Donatello’s work. The David and the St. John, together with a portrait-bust and the coat of arms, still show their practical appreciation of his work and Donatello’s gratitude to the family. Vasari is the first to mention these works, and it must be remarked that Albertini, who paid great attention to Donatello, mentions nothing but antique sculpture in the Martelli palace. The David and the St. John Baptist are both in marble, and were probably made between 1415 and 1425. The David, which was always prized by the family, is shown in the background of Bronzino’s portrait of Ugolino Martelli.[58] It was then standing in the courtyard of the palace, but was taken indoors in 1802 per intemperias. The statue is not altogether a success. Its allure is good: but the anatomy is feminine, the type is soft and yielding; the attitude is not spontaneous; and the head of Goliath, tucked uncomfortable between the feet, is poor. There is a bronze statuette in Berlin which has been considered a study for this figure, though it is most unlikely that Donatello himself would have taken the trouble to make bronze versions of his preparatory studies. The work, however, is in all probability by Donatello, and most of the faults in the marble statue being corrected, it may be later than the Martelli figure, from which it also varies in several particulars. The statuette is full of life and vigour, and the David is a sturdy shepherd-boy who might well engage a lion or a bear. In one respect the Martelli figure is of great importance. It is unfinished—the only unfinished marble we have of the master, and it gives an insight into the methods he employed. It is fortunate that we have some means of understanding how Donatello gained his ends, although this statue does not show him at his best; indeed it may have been abandoned because it did not reach his expectations. However, we have nothing else to judge by. The first criticism suggested by the David is that Donatello betrays the great effort it cost him. Like the unfinished Faith by Mino da Fiesole,[59] it is laboured and experimental. They set to work hoping that later stages would enable them to rectify any error or miscalculation, but both found they had gone too far. The material would permit no such thing, and with all their skill one sees that the blocks of marble did not unfold the statues which lay hidden within. As hewers of stone, Donatello and Mino cannot compare with Michael Angelo. Jacopo della Quercia alone had something
[Footnote 58: In the Berlin Gallery.]
[Footnote 59: Berlin Museum.]
[Footnote 60: All three in Bargello.]
[Footnote 61: See p. 185.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
PALAZZO MARTELLI, FLORENCE]
[Illustration: Alinari
BARGELLO]
[Sidenote: Early Figures of St. John.]
Another important statue in the Martelli palace is that of St. John the Baptist. Besides being the earliest patron of Florence, St. John was the titular saint of every Baptistery in the land. This accounts for the frequency with which we find his statues and scenes from his life, particularly in Tuscany. With Donatello he was to some extent a speciality, and we can almost trace the sculptor’s evolution in his presentment of the Baptist, beginning with the chivalrous figure on the Campanile and ending with the haggard ascetic of Venice. We have St. John as a child in the Bargello, as a boy in Rome, as a stripling in the Martelli palace. On the bell-tower he is grown up, in the Frari he is growing older, and at Siena he is shown as old as Biblical history would permit. The St. John in the Casa Martelli, oltra tutti singolare,[62] was so highly prized that it was made an heirloom, with penalties for such members of the family who disposed of it. This St. John is a link between the Giovannino and the mature prophet. He is, as it were, dazed, and sets forth upon his errand with open-mouthed wonder. He has a strain of melancholy, and seems rather weakly and hesitating. But there is no attempt after emaciation. The limbs are well made, and as sturdy as one would expect, in view of the unformed lines of the model: the hands also are good. As regards the face, one notices that the nose and mouth are rather crooked, and that the eyes diverge: not, indeed, that these defects are really displeasing, since they are what one sometimes finds in living youth. Another Baptist which has hitherto escaped attention is the small marble figure, about four feet high,
[Footnote 62: Bocchi, 23. Like the David, it used to live out of doors, until in 1755 Nicolaus Martelli “in aedes suas transtulit.” Its base dates from 1794.]
[Footnote 63: It was acquired for nine zechins in 1784. Madame Andre has a version in stucco, on rather a larger scale. A marble version from the Strawberry Hill Collection now belongs to Sir Charles Dilke, M.P.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: CLAY SKETCH OF CRUCIFIXION AND FLAGELLATION
LONDON]
[Sidenote: Donatello as Architect and Painter.]
Fully as Donatello realised the unity of the arts, we cannot claim him as a universal genius, like Leonardo or Michael Angelo, who combined the art of literature with plastic, pictorial and architectural distinction. But at the same time Donatello did not confine himself to sculpture. He was a member of the Guild of St. Luke: he designed a stained-glass window for the Cathedral: his opinion on building the Cupola was constantly invited, and he made a number of marble works, such as niches, fountains, galleries and tombs, into which the pursuit of architecture and construction was bound to enter. Moreover, his backgrounds were usually suggested by architectural motives. Donatello joined the painters’ guild of St. Luke in 1412, and in a document of this year he is called Pictor.[64] There is a great variety in the names and qualifications given to artists during the fifteenth century. In the first edition of the Lives, Vasari calls Ghiberti a painter. Pisano, the medallist, signed himself Pictor. Lastrajuolo, or stone-fitter, is applied to Nanni di Banco.[65] Giovanni Nani was called Tagliapietra,[66] Donatello is also called Marmoraio, picchiapietre,[67] and woodcarver.[68] In the commission from the Orvieto Cathedral for a bronze Baptist he is comprehensively described as “intagliatorem figurarum, magistrum lapidum atque intagliatorem figurarum in ligno et eximium magistrum omnium trajectorum."[69] Finally, like Ciuffagni,[70] he is called aurifex, goldsmith.[71] Cellini mentions Donatello’s success in painting,[72] and Gauricus, who wrote early in the sixteenth century, says that the favourite maxim inculcated by Donatello to his pupils was “designate”—“Draw: that is the whole foundation of sculpture."[73] The only pictorial work that has survived is the great stained-glass Coronation of the Virgin in the Duomo. Ghiberti submitted a competitive cartoon and the Domopera
[Footnote 64: Domopera archives, 12, viii., 1412.]
[Footnote 65: Ibid., 31, xii., 1407.]
[Footnote 66: Padua, 3, iv., 1443.]
[Footnote 67: When working at Pisa in 1427. See Centofanti, p. 4.]
[Footnote 68: Commission for bronze Baptist for Ancona, 1422.]
[Footnote 69: Contract in Orvieto archives, 10, ii., 1423.]
[Footnote 70: Domopera, 2, ix., 1429.]
[Footnote 71: Ibid. 18, iii., 1426.]
[Footnote 72: “Due Trattati,” ch. xii.]
[Footnote 73: Pomponius Gauricus, “De Sculptura,” 1504, p. b, iii.]
[Footnote 74: April 1434.]
[Footnote 75: See American Journal of Arch., June 1900.]
[Footnote 76: The so-called St. George in the Royal Library at Windsor has been determined by Mr. R. Holmes to be Perugino’s study for the St. Michael in the National Gallery triptych. In the Uffizzi several pen-and-ink drawings are attributed to Donatello. The four eagles, the group of three peasants, the two figures seen from behind (Frame 5, No. 181), and the candlestick (Frame 7, No. 61 s.), are nondescript studies in which no specific sign of Donatello appears. The five winged Putti (Frame 7, No. 40 f.) and the two studies of the Madonna (Frame 7, No. 38 f.) are more Donatellesque, but they show the niggling touch of some draughtsman who tried to make a sketch by mere indications with his pen. There is also a study in brown wash of the Baptistery Magdalen: probably made from, and not for, the statue. The Louvre has an ink sketch (No. 2225, Reynolds and His De la Salle Collections) of the three Maries at the Tomb, or perhaps a fragment of a Crucifixion, with a fourth figure, cowled like a monk. It is a gaunt composition, made with very strong lines. It may be noted that the eyes are roughly suggested by circles, a mannerism which recurs in several drawings ascribed to Donatello. This was also a trick of Baldassare Peruzzi (Sketch-Book, Siena Library, p. 13, &c.). In the British Museum there is an Apostle holding a book (No. 1860, 6. 13. 31), with a Donatellesque hand and forearm; also a Lamentation over the dead Christ (No. 1862, 7. 2. 189). Both are interesting drawings, but the positive evidence of Donatello’s authorship is nil. Mr. Gathorne Hardy’s drawing, which has been ascribed to Donatello, is really by Mantegna, a capital study for one of the frescoes in the Eremitani.]
[Footnote 77: Uffizzi, Frame 6, No. 6347 f.]
[Footnote 78: See Life by J.T. Smith, 1828.]
[Footnote 79: Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 7619, 1861. This sketch, which appears to have been made for the Forzori family, has been mistaken for a study for the San Lorenzo pulpit.]
[Illustration: Alinari
THE GROUP BY VERROCCHIO]
Sculpture relies upon the contour, architecture upon the line. The distinction is vital, and were it not for the number and importance of the exceptions, from Michael Angelo down to Alfred Stevens, one would think that the sculptor-architect would be an anomaly. In describing the pursuits of Donatello and Brunellesco during their first visit to Rome, Manetti says that the former was engrossed by his plastic researches, “senza mai aprire gli occhi alla architettura.” It is difficult to believe that Donatello had no eyes for architecture. There are several reasons to show that later on he gave some attention to its study. Like the Roman Tabernacle, the Niche on Or San Michele[80] is without any Gothic details. Albertini mentions Donatello as its sole author, but it is probable that Michelozzo, who helped on the statue of St. Louis, was also associated with its niche. It is a notable work, designed without much regard to harmony between various orders of architecture, but making a very rich and pleasing whole. It is decorated with some admirable reliefs. On the base are winged putti carrying a wreath; in the spandrils above the arch are two more. The upper frieze has also winged cherubs’ heads, six of them with swags of fruit and foliage, all of exceptional charm and vivacity. The motive of wings recurs in the large triangular space at the top; flanking the magnificent Trinity, three grave and majestic heads, which though united are kept distinct, and though similar in type are full of individual character. This little relief, placed rather high, and discountenanced by the bronze group below, is a memorable achievement of the early fifteenth century and heralds the advent of the power and solemnity, the Terribilita of Michael Angelo. Donatello’s aptitude for architectural setting is also illustrated by the choristers’ galleries in the Cathedral and San Lorenzo. The former must be dealt with in detail when considering Donatello’s treatment of childhood. As an architectural work it shows how the sculptor employed decorative adjuncts such as mosaic and majolica[81] to set off the white marble; he also added deep maroon slabs of porphyry and bronze heads, thus combining various arts and materials. Having no sculpture, the Cantoria of San Lorenzo is perhaps more important in this connection, as it is purely constructive, while its condition is intact: the Cathedral gallery having been rebuilt on rather conjectural lines. In San Lorenzo we find the same ideas and peculiarities, such as the odd egg and dart moulding which reappears on the Annunciation. The colour effects are obtained by porphyry and inlaid marbles. But we see how much Donatello trusted to sculpture, and how indifferently he fared without it. This gallery does not retain one’s attention. There is a stiffness about it, almost a monotony, and it looks more like the fragment of a balcony than a Cantoria, for there is no marked terminal motive to complete and enclose it
[Footnote 80: The niche was completed about 1424-5. There is a drawing of it in Vettorio Ghiberti’s Note-book, p. 70. Landucci, in his “Diario Fiorentino,” says that Verrocchio’s group was placed in it on June 21, 1483.]
[Footnote 81: Cf. Payments to Andrea Moscatello, for painted and glazed terra-cotta for the Paduan altar. May 1449.]
[Footnote 82: From the Residenza dell’ arte degli Albergatori, and that of the Rigattieri of Florence, figured on plates xii. and xv. of Carocci’s “Ricordi del Mercato Vecchio,” 1887.]
[Footnote 83: Cf. Payments for work on “Archi de la balcona de lo lavoriero de la +,” i.e., the crociera of the church, March 30 and April 11, 1444.]
[Footnote 84: Siena Library.]
[Footnote 85: Domopera, 7, vii. 1433.]
[Illustration: Alinari
BARGELLO]
[Illustration: Alinari
THE MARTELLI SHIELD]
Two fountains are ascribed to Donatello, made respectively for the Pazzi and Medici families. The former now belongs to Signor Bardini. It is a fine bold thing, but the figure and centrepiece are unfortunately missing. The marble is coated with the delicate patina of water: its decoration is rather nondescript, but there is no reason to suppose that Rossellino’s fonte mentioned by Albertini was the only one possessed by the Great House of the Pazzi. The Medici fountain, now in the Pitti Palace, is rather larger, being nearly eight feet high. The decoration is opulent, and one could not date these florid ideas before Donatello’s later years. The boy at the top dragging along a swan is Donatellesque, but with mannerisms to which we are unaccustomed. The work is not convincing as regards his authorship. The marble Lavabo in the sacristy of San Lorenzo is also a doubtful piece of sculpture. It has been attributed to Verrocchio, Donatello and Rossellino. It has least affinity to Donatello. The detailed attention paid by the sculptor to the floral decoration, and the fussy manner in which the whole thing is overcrowded, as if the artist were afraid of simplicity, suggest the hand of Rossellino, to whom Albertini, the first writer on the subject, has ascribed it. Donatello made the Marzocco, the emblematic Lion of the Florentines, and it has therefore been assumed that he also made its marble pedestal. This is held to be contemporary with the niche of Or San Michele. So far as the architectural and decorative lines are concerned this is not impossible, though the early Renaissance motives long retained their popularity. There is, however, one detail showing that the base must be at least twenty-five years older than the niche. The arms of the various quarters of Florence are carved upon the frieze of the base. Among these shields we notice one bearing “on a field semee of fleurs-de-lys, a label, above all a bendlet dexter.” These are not Italian arms. They were granted in 1452 to Jean, Comte de Dunois, an illegitimate son of the Duc d’Orleans. His coat had previously borne the bendlet sinister, but this was officially
[Footnote 86: Cf. those high up on the Loggia de’ Lanzi, or in other Tuscan towns where the climate was not more severe, but where there was less cash or inclination to replace the shields which were worn away.]
[Footnote 87: The marble original is now in the Bargello, and has been replaced by a bronze replica, which occupies the old site on the Ringhiera of the Palazzo Pubblico. Lions were popular in Florence. Albertini mentions an antique porphyry lion in the Casa Capponi, much admired by Lorenzo de’ Medici. Paolo Ucello painted a lion fight for Cosimo. The curious rhymed chronicle of 1459 describes the lion fights in the great Piazza ("Rer. It. Script.,” ii. 722). Other cases could be quoted. Donatello also made a stone lion for the courtyard of the house used by Martin V. during his visit to Florence in 1419-20.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
SALOME RELIEF, SIENA.
STATUETTE OF FAITH (TO LEFT)]
[Sidenote: The Siena Font.]
Siena had planned her Cathedral on so ambitious a scale, that had not the plague reduced her to penury the Duomo of Florence would have been completely outrivalled. The Sienese, however, ordered various works of importance for their Cathedral, and among these the Font takes a high place. It was entrusted to Jacopo della Quercia, who had the active assistance of Donatello and Ghiberti, as well as that of the Turini and Neroccio, townsmen of his own. Donatello was thus brought under new influences. He made a relief, a sportello or little door, two statuettes, and some children, all in bronze, being helped in the casting by Michelozzo. Jacopo, who was about ten years older than Donatello, had been a competitor for the Baptistery gates. He was a man of immense power, in some ways greater than Donatello; never failing to treat his work on broad and massive lines, and one of the few sculptors whose work can survive mutilation. The fragments of the Fonte Gaya need no reconstruction or repair to tell their meaning; their statuesque virtues, though sadly mangled, proclaim the unmistakable touch of genius. But Donatello’s personality was not affected by the Sienese artists. Jacopo, it is true, was constantly absent, being busily engaged at Bologna, to the acute annoyance of the Sienese, who ordered him to return forthwith. Jacopo said he would die rather than disobey, “potius eligeret mori quam non obedire patriae suae”; but the political troubles at the northern town prevented his prompt return. However, after being fined he got home, was reconciled to the Chapter, and ultimately received high honours from the city. His font is an interesting example of transition; the base is much more Gothic than the upper part. The base or font proper is a large hexagonal bason decorated with six bronze reliefs and a bronze statuette between each—Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice, Prudence,
[Footnote 88: 9. v. 1427. Milanesi, ii. 134.]
[Footnote 89: Lusini, 28.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
TOMB OF COSCIA, POPE JOHN XXIII.
BAPTISTERY, FLORENCE]
[Illustration: Alinari
EFFIGY OF POPE JOHN XXIII.
BAPTISTERY, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: Michelozzo and the Coscia Tomb.]
For ten years Donatello was associated with Michelozzo,[90] who began as assistant and finally entered into a partnership which lasted until 1433. The whole subject is obscure, and until we have a critical biography of Michelozzo his relation with various men and monuments of the fifteenth century must remain problematical. Michelozzo has not hitherto received his due meed of appreciation. As a sculptor and architect he frequently held a subordinate position, and it has been assumed that he therefore lacked independence and originality. But the man who was Court architect of the Medici, and director of the Cathedral building staff, was no mere hack; while his sculpture at Milan, Naples, and Montepulciano show that his plastic abilities were far from mean. He was a great man with interludes of smallness. When Donatello required technical help in casting, Michelozzo was called in. Though Donatello had worked for Ghiberti on the bronze gates, he was never quite at home in the science of casting. Gauricus says he always employed professional help—“nunquam fudit ipse, campanariorum usus opera semper."[91] Caldieri cast for him at Padua. Michelozzo also helped Luca della Robbia in casting the Sacristy gates which Donatello should have made; the commissions which Donatello threw over were those for work in bronze. The partnership extended over some of the best years of Donatello’s life, and three tombs, the St. Louis, and the Prato pulpit are among their joint products. The tombs of Pope John XXIII. in the Baptistery, that of Aragazzi the Papal Secretary at Montepulciano, and that of Cardinal Brancacci at Naples, are noteworthy landmarks in the evolution of sepulchral monuments, which attained their highest perfection in Italy. In discussing them it will be seen how fully Michelozzo shared the responsibilities of Donatello. Baldassare Coscia, on his election to the Papacy, took the title of John XXIII. He was deposed by a council and retired to Florence, where he died in 1418. He was befriended by the Medici, who erected the monument, the last papal tomb outside Rome, to his memory. “Johannes Quondam Papa XXIII.” is inscribed on it, and it is said that Coscia’s successful rival objected to this appellation of his predecessor, but the protest went unheeded. The tomb is remarkable in many ways. Its construction is most skilful, as it was governed by the two upright pillars between which the monument had to be fitted. We have a series of horizontal lines; a frieze at the base, then three Virtues; above this the effigy, and finally a Madonna beneath a baldachino. Each tier is separated by lines which intersect the columns at right angles. The task of making a monument which would not be dwarfed
[Footnote 90: See “Arch. Storico dell’ Arte,” 1893, p. 209.]
[Footnote 91: “De Sculptura,” 1504, folio e. 1. On the other hand, the sculptor Verrocchio cast a bell for the Vallombrosans in 1474, and artillery for the Venetian Republic.]
[Footnote 92: Op. cit. p. 70. In this drawing two putti are also shown holding a shield, above the monument; this has now disappeared.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Aragazzi Tomb.]
In the Denunzia de’ beni of 1427 Donatello states that he was working with Michelozzo on the tomb of Bartolommeo Aragazzi, and the monument has therefore been ascribed to them both. But recent research has established that, though preparatory orders were given in that year, a fresh contract was made two years later, and that Donatello’s share in the work was nil. Michelozzo alone got payment up to 1436 or thereabouts, when the tomb was completed. Donatello’s influence would, perhaps, have been visible in the design, but unhappily we can no longer even judge of this, for the tomb is a wreck, having been broken up to make room for structural alterations.[93] Important fragments are preserved, scattered about the church; but the sketch of the tomb, said to be preserved in the local library, has never yet been discovered. The monument had ill-fortune from the very beginning. An amusing letter has come down to us, pathetic too, for it records the first incident in the tragedy. Leonardo Aretino writes to Poggio, that when going home one day he came across a party of men trying to extricate a wagon which had stuck in the deep ruts. The oxen were out of breath and the teamsmen out of temper. Leonardo went up to them and made inquiries. One of the carters, wiping the sweat from his brow, muttered an imprecation upon poets, past, present and future (Dii perdant poetas omnes, et qui fuerunt unquam et qui futuri sunt.) Leonardo, a poet himself, asked what harm they had done him: and the man simply replied that it was because this poet, Aragazzi, who was lately dead, ordered his marble tomb to be taken all the way to Montepulciano from Rome, where he died; hence the trouble. “Haec est imago ejus quam cernis,” said the man, pointing to the effigy, having incidentally remarked that Aragazzi was “stultus nempe homo ac ventosus."[94] Certainly Aragazzi was not a successful man, and he was addicted to vanity. In the marble we see a wan melancholy face, seemingly of one who failed to secure due measure of public recognition. The monument need not be further described, except to say that two of the surviving figures are very remarkable. They probably acted as caryatides, of which there must have been three, replacing ordinary columns as supporters of the sarcophagus. They can hardly be Virtues, for they are obviously muscular men with curly hair and brawny arms. They are not quite free from mannerisms: the attitudes, granting that the bent position were required by their support of the tomb, are not quite easy or natural. But, in spite of this, they are really magnificent things, placing their author high among sculptors of his day.
[Footnote 93: The effigy is placed in a niche close to the great door of the Cathedral, put there “lest the memory of so distinguished a man should perish”—“Simulacrum ejus diu neglectum, ne tanti viri memoria penitus deleretur, Politiana pietas hic collocandum curavit anno MDCCCXV.” The remainder consists of a frieze now incorporated in the high altar, on either side of which stand two caryatides. The Christ Blessing is close by. Two bas-reliefs are inserted into pillars opposite the effigy.]
[Footnote 94: “Letters,” Florence ed. 1741, vol. ii. 45.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
NAPLES]
[Sidenote: The Brancacci Tomb.]
The Church of Sant’ Angelo a Nilo at Naples contains the monument of Cardinal Brancacci, one of the most impressive tombs of this period. The scheme is a modification of the Coscia tomb. Instead of the three Virtues in niches at the base, there are three larger allegorical figures, which are free standing caryatides below the sarcophagus. They are allegorical figures, perhaps Fates, and correspond with the two somewhat similar statues at Montepulciano. The Cardinal’s effigy lies upon the stone coffin, the face of which has a bas-relief between heraldic shields. Two angels stand above the recumbent figure, holding back the curtain which extends upwards to the next storey, surrounding a deep lunette in which there is a Madonna between two Saints. Here the monument should have ended, but it is surmounted by an ogival arch, flanked by two trumpeting children and with a central medallion of God the Father. This topmost tier may have been a subsequent addition. It overweights the whole monument, introduces a discordant architectural motive, and is decorated by inferior sculpture. The Madonna in the lunette is also poor, and the curtain looks as if it were made of lead. But the lower portion of the tomb compensates for the faults above. The caryatides, the bas-relief of the Assumption, the Cardinal himself and the mourning angels above him, are all superb in their different ways. Michelozzo may have been responsible for the architecture, and Pagno di Lapo for the upper reliefs. Donatello himself made the priceless relief of the Assumption, also the effigy, and the two attendants standing above it. The entire tomb is marble: it was made at Pisa,[95] close to the inexhaustible quarries which, being near to the sea, made transport easy and cheap. From the time of Strabo, the marmor Lunense had been carried thence to every port of the Peninsula.[96] Michelozzo took the tomb to Naples, and perhaps added the final touches: not, indeed, that the carving is quite complete, the Cardinal’s ear, for instance, being rough-hewn. Brancacci lies to the left, wearing a mitre on his head, which is raised on a pillow. The chiselling of the face is masterly. The features are shown in painful restless repose. The eyes are sunken and half closed: the lips are drawn, the brow contracted, and the throat shows all the tendons and veins which one notices in the Habbakuk, but which are here relaxed and uncontrolled. It is a death-mask: a grim and instantaneous likeness of the supreme moment, when the agony may have passed away, but not without leaving indelible traces of the crisis. The two angels look down on the dead prelate. They hold back the curtain
[Footnote 95: Donatello worked there for eighteen months. See documents in Centofanti, p. 4, &c.]
[Footnote 96: “_... Lapides albi et discolores ad coeruleum vergente specie._” Strabo, “Geog.,” 1807 ed., I. v. p. 314.]
[Footnote 97: Louvre, No. 216. Tomb of Philippe Pot, circa 1480.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Stiacciato.]
The Assumption of the Virgin occupies the central position of the tomb. It is a small panel. The Virgin is seated in a folding-chair which is familiar in fifteenth-century art. Surrounding her are angels supporting the clouds which make an oval halo round her, a mandorla. The cloud, curiously enough, is very heavy, yielding to the touch, and upheld by the flying angels, whose hands press their way into it, and bear their burden with manifest effort. There is none of the limpid atmosphere which Perugino secured in painting, and Ghiberti in sculpture. But, on the other hand, the air is full of drama, presaging an event for which Donatello thought a placid sky unsuitable. There are seven angels in all; the lowest, upon whose head the Virgin rests her foot, is half Blake and half Michael Angelo. But there are many other busy little cherubs swimming, climbing, and flying amidst the interstices of cloudland. The Virgin herself, draped in easy-flowing material, has folded her hands, and awaits her entry to Paradise. Her face is the picture of anxiety and apprehension. The Assumption is carved in the lowest possible relief, called stiacciato. The word means depressed or flattened. It is the word with which Condivi describes the appearance of Michael Angelo’s nose after it had been broken—it was “un poco stiacciato; non per natura,” but by the blow of a certain Torrigiano, “huomo bestiale e superbo."[98] Donatello was fond of this method of work. We have a fine example in London,[99] and his most successful use of stiacciato is on the Roman Tabernacle made a few years after the Brancacci relief. Donatello did not invent this style. It had been used in classical times,
[Footnote 98: “Vita di Michael Angelo,” Rome, 1553, p. 49.]
[Footnote 99: Victoria and Albert Museum, Charge to Peter. See p. 95.]
[Footnote 100: British Museum, Assyrian Saloon, Nos. 63-6.]
[Footnote 101: Bode, “Florentiner Bildhauer,” p. 119.]
[Footnote 102: In the Museo Archeologico in the Castello, unnumbered.]
[Footnote 103: By Alfred Gilbert, R.A., belonging to the present Earl of Lytton.]
[Footnote 104: See Armand, “Les Medailleurs Italiens,” 1887, iii. p. 3.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
SIENA CATHEDRAL]
[Sidenote: Tombs of Pecci, Crivelli, and Others.]
The tomb of Giovanni de’ Medici in San Lorenzo is interesting, and has been ascribed to Donatello. There is no documentary authority for this attribution, and on stylistic grounds it is untenable.[105] It is a detached tomb, so common elsewhere, but of singular rarity in Italy. The isolated tomb like this one, like that of Ilaria del Carretto, or that of Pope Sixtus IV. in St. Peter’s, has great advantages over the tall upright monument applique to a church wall. The latter is, however, the ordinary type of the Renaissance. The free-standing tomb can be seen from all aspects and lights. Although it must be smaller—some of the later wall-tombs are fifty feet high—the sculptor was obliged to keep his entire work well within the range of vision, and had to rely on plastic art alone for success. Much admirable sculpture, especially the effigies, has been lost by being placed too high on some pretentious catafalque in relief against a wall. The tomb of Giovanni, it is true, though standing in the centre of the sacristy, is covered by a large marble slab, which is the priest’s table. It throws the tomb into dark shadow and makes it difficult to see the carving. There are few tombs of important people upon which so much trouble has been expended with so little result. Donatello is also said to have made a tomb for the Albizzi, but it has perished.[106] The tomb of Chellini in San Miniato, which tradition ascribed to Donatello, is probably the work of Pagno di Lapo. The prim and priggish Cardinal Accaiuoli in the Certosa of Florence does not suggest Donatello’s hand. Though conscientious and painstaking, the work is without a spark of energy or conviction. These latter are slab-tombs, flat plates fastened into the church pavements. We have two authentic tombs of this character, on both of which Donatello has signed his name. Had he not done so, we could never have established his authorship of the marble slab-tomb of Archdeacon Crivelli in the Church of Ara Coeli at Rome. It has been trampled by the feet of so many generations, that all the features have been worn away; the legend is wholly effaced in certain parts, and one corner has had to be restored (though at some early date). But at best it cannot have compared with Donatello’s similar tomb of Bishop Pecci at Siena, and one could quote numerous instances of equally good work by nameless men. There is one close to the Crivelli marble itself, another in the Pisa Baptistery, two in Santa Croce, and so forth. This kind of tomb had to undergo rough
[Footnote 105: Wreaths and putti form its decoration, and though Donatellesque, they are not by Donatello. This was pointed out as early as 1819. See “Monumenti Sepolcrali della Toscana,” p. 28.]
[Footnote 106: Bocchi, 354.]
[Footnote 107: Bull., “Cum primum,” sec. 6, “et ut in ecclesiis nihil indecens relinquatur, iidem provideant, ut capsae omnes, et deposita, seu alia cadaverum, conditoria super terram existentia omnino amoveantur, pro ut alias statutum fuit, et defunctorum corpora in tumbis profundis, infra terram collocentur.” Bullarium, 1566, vol. iv., part ii., p. 285. For the whole question of the evolution of these tombs, see Dr. von Lichtenberg’s valuable book, “Das Portraet an Grabdenkmalen,” Strassburg, 1902.]
[Footnote 108: See “Archivio Storico dell’ Arte,” 1888, p. 24, &c.]
[Footnote 109: In Santo Stefano, Cortile di Pilato.]
[Footnote 110: “Misc. Storica Senese,” 1893, p. 30.]
[Footnote 111: See p. 171.]
[Footnote 112: From the Duchess of Malfi, quoted in Symonds’ “Fine Arts,” p. 114.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Second Visit to Rome.]
During the year 1433, when Florence enjoyed the luxury of driving Cosimo de’ Medici into exile, Donatello went to Rome in order to advise Simone Ghini about the tomb of Pope Martin V.—temporum suorum filicitas, as the epitaph says.[113] This visit to Rome, which is not contested, like the visit thirty years earlier, did not last long, and certainly did not divert Donatello from the line he had struck out. At this moment the native art of Rome was colourless. A generation later it became classical, and then lapsed into decadence. The number of influences at work was far smaller than would at first be imagined. It is generally assumed that Rome was the home of classical sculpture. But early in the fifteenth century Rome must have presented a scene of desolation. The city had long been a quarry. Under Vespasian the Senate had to pass a decree against the demolition of buildings for the purpose of getting the stone.[114] Rome was plundered by her emperors. She was looted by Alaric, Genseric, Wittig and Totila in days when much of her art remained in situ. She was
[Footnote 113: It is a bronze slab, admirably wrought and preserved, in S. Giovanni Laterano. Were it not for an exuberance of decoration, one might say that Donatello was responsible for it; the main lines certainly harmonise with his work. Simone Ghini was mistaken by Vasari for Donatello’s somewhat problematical brother Simone.]
[Footnote 114: See Codex. Just. Leg. 2. Cod. de aedif. privatis. A similar law at Herculaneum had forbidden people to make more money by breaking up a house than they paid for the house itself, under penalty of being fined double the original outlay. This shows the extent of speculative destruction. Reinesius, “Synt. Inscript. Antiq.,” 475, No. 2.]
[Footnote 115: See his Libellus in “Rer. Gall. Script.,” xiv. 313.]
[Footnote 116: Nihil fere recognoscat quod priorem urbem repraesentet, in “De Varietate fortunae urbis Romae.” Nov. Thes. Antiq. Rom., i. 502.]
[Footnote 117: “Ricordi,” 1544. No. 109, p. 51.]
[Footnote 118: Written about 1450. “De re aedificatoria.” Paris ed. 1553, p. 165.]
[Footnote 119: Cf. Plate 49 in “Le Rovine di Roma.” “Tempio circolare.” Written beside it is “Questo sie uno tempio lo quale e Atiuero (i.e., che e presso al Tevere) dove se chauaue li prede antigha mente (i.e., si cavavano le pietre anticamente).”]
[Footnote 120: Vasari, “Proemio,” i. 212.]
[Footnote 121: Cosa allora rara, non essendosi dissotterata quella abbondanza che si e fatta ne’ tempi nostri, i. 203.]
[Footnote 122: “2nd Commentary,” in Vasari, I. xxviii.]
[Footnote 123: Gaye, i. 360.]
[Footnote 124: Cf. the action of the Directory in year vi. of the French Republic. They ordered the statues looted in Italy to be paraded in Paris—hoping to find the clue to ancient supremacy. Louis David pointedly observed, “La vue ... formera peut-etre des savans, des Winckelmann: mais des artistes, non.”]
[Footnote 125: “Works,” 1796, i. 151.]
[Footnote 126: “Lectures,” 1838, p. 248.]
[Footnote 127: Semper, p. 93.]
[Footnote 128: Ed. 1768, p. 74.]
[Footnote 129: “Donatellus, qui primum omnium vetustis monumentis mirifice delectatus est, eaque imitari ac probe exprimere in suis operibus adsidue studuit.”—“Dactyliotheca Smithiana,” 1768, II. p. cxxvi.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
ST. PETER’S, ROME]
[Illustration: THE CHARGE TO PETER
LONDON]
[Sidenote: Work at Rome.]
Up till a few years ago the most important work Donatello made in Rome was unknown. We were aware that he had made a tabernacle, but all record of it was lost, until Herr Schmarsow identified it in 1886.[130] It was probably made for the Church of Santa Maria della Febbre,[131] and was transported to St. Peter’s when Santa Maria was converted into a sacristy. The tabernacle is now in the Sacristy of the Canons, surrounded by sham flowers and tawdry decoration, which reduce its charms to a minimum. Moreover, the miraculous painting of the Madonna and Child which fills the centrepiece—having, perhaps, replaced a metal grille or marble relief, has been so frequently restored that a discordant element is introduced. The tabernacle is about six feet high; it is made of rather coarse Travestine marble, and in several parts shows indications of the hand of an assistant. It has suffered in removal; there are two places where the work has been repaired, and the medallion in the lower frieze has been filled with modern mosaic; otherwise it is in good order. It is essentially an architectural work, but the number of figures introduced has softened the hard lines of the construction, giving it plenty of life. Four little angels, rather stumpy and ill-drawn, are sitting on the lower plinth. Above them rise the main outer columns which support the upper portion of the tabernacle, and enclose the central opening, where the picture is now fixed. At the base of these columns there are two groups of winged children, three on either side, looking inwards towards the central feature of the composition. They bend forward reverently with their hands joined in prayer and adoration—admirable children, full
[Footnote 130: See Schmarsow, p. 32.]
[Footnote 131: See “Arch. Storico dell’ Arte,” 1888, p. 24.]
[Footnote 132: Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 7629, 1861. Bocchi says: “Un quadro di marmo di mano di Donatello di basso relievo: dove e effigiato quando da le chiavi Cristo a S. Pietro. Estimata molto da gli artefici questa opera: la quale per invenzione e rara, e per disegno maravigliosa. Molto e commendata la figura di Cristo, e la prontezza che si scorge nel S. Pietro. E parimente la Madonna posta in ginocchione, la quale in atto affetuoso ha sembiante mirabile e divoto,” p. 372.]
[Footnote 133: “Ammaestramento Utile,” 1686, p. 141. “Una testa nel deposito a mano destra della Porta Maggiore, e scoltura di Donatello Fiorentino.” In Chapel of Paul V., Sta. M. Maggiore: “In terra in una lapide vi e di profilo la figura del Canonico Morosini, opera di Donatello famoso scultore e architetto.” Ibid. p. 241.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Medici Medallions.]
The Medici did not remain in exile long, and their return to Florence marks an epoch in the artistic as well as the political history of Tuscany. From this moment the sway of the private collector and patron began. Gradually the great churches and corporations ceased giving orders on the grand scale, for much of the needful decoration was by then completed. By the middle of the century patronage was almost wholly vested in the magnates of commerce and politics: if a chapel were painted or a memorial statue set up, in most cases the artist worked for the donor, and not for the church authorities. The monumental type of sculpture became more rare, bric a brac more common. Well-known men like Donatello received the old kind of commission to the end of their lives, while younger men, though
[Footnote 134: Molinier, “Les Plaquettes,” 1886, p. xxvi.]
[Footnote 135: Cf. St. Ursula, Accademia, Venice, No. 574.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
BARGELLO, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: The Bronze David.]
According to Vasari, the Bronze David was made for Cosimo before the exile of the Medici, and consequently previous to Donatello’s second journey to Rome. It was removed from the courtyard of the palace to the Palazzo Pubblico, where it remained for many years. Doni mentions it as being there in 1549,[136] and soon afterwards it was replaced by Verrocchio’s fountain of the Boy squeezing the Dolphin. It is now in the Bargello. The base has been lost. Albertini says it was made of variegated marbles.[137] Vasari says it was a simple column.[138] It has been suggested that the marble pillar now supporting the Judith belonged to the David, but the David is even less fitted to this ill-conceived and pedantic shaft than Judith herself. The David soon acquired popularity; the French envoy, Pierre de Rohan, wanted a copy of it. It was certainly a remarkable innovation, being probably the first free-standing nude statue made in Italy for a thousand years. There had been countless nude figures in relief, but the David was intended to be seen from every side of Cosimo’s cortile. There was no experimental stage with Donatello; his success was immediate and indeed conclusive. David is a stripling. He stands over the head of Goliath, a sword in one hand and a stone in the other, wearing his helmet, a sort of sun-hat in bronze which is decorated with a chaplet of leaves; below his feet is a wreath of bay. It is a consistent study in anatomy. The David is perhaps sixteen years old, agile and supple, with a hand which is big relative to the forearm, as nature ordains. The back is bony and rather angular; the torso is brilliantly wrought, with a purity of outline and a morbidezza which made the artists in Vasari’s time believe the figure had been moulded from life. One might break the statue into half a dozen pieces, and every fragment would retain its vitality and significance. The limbs are alert and full of young strength, with plenty more held in reserve: it is heroic in all respects except dimension. The face is clear cut, and each feature is rendered with precision. The expression is one of dreamy contemplation as he looks downwards on the spoils and proof of conquest. David hath slain his tens of thousands! Finally the quality of the statue is enhanced by the care with which the bronze has been chiselled. Goliath’s helmet, and David’s greaves, on which the fleur de lys florencee has been damascened, are decorated with unfailing tact. The embellishment is in itself a pleasure to the eye, but it is prudently contained within its legitimate sphere; for Donatello would not allow the accessory to invade the statue itself, which is the chief fault of the rival David by Verrocchio. Donatello’s statue marks an epoch in the study of anatomy. It is a genuine interpretation of a very perfect piece of humanity; but his knowledge compared with that of his successors
[Footnote 136: “_... una colonna nel mezzo dove e un Davitte di Donatello dignissimo._” Letter to Alberto Lollio, 17. viii. 1549, Bottari, iii. 341.]
[Footnote 137: Giu abasso e Davit di bronzo sopra la colonna fine di marmo variegato. “Memoriale.”]
[Footnote 138: “Life of Bandinelli,” x. 301.]
[Footnote 139: “Due dialogi di Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano,” 1564; a tiresome and discursive tirade.]
[Footnote 140: 22. viii. 1582. Reprinted in Bottari, ii. 529.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
IN OPERA DEL DUOMO, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: Donatello and Childhood.]
Michael Angelo strove to attain the universal form. His world was peopled with Titans, and he realised his ambition of portraying generic humanity: not, indeed, by making conventional, but by eliminating everything that was not typical. The earliest plastic art took clay and moulded the human form; the next achievement was to make specific man—the portrait; lastly, to achieve what was universal—the type. The progress was from man, to man in particular, and ultimately to man in general. There was a final stage when the typical lost its type without reverting to the specific, to the portrait. The successors of Michael Angelo were among the most skilful craftsmen who ever existed; but their knowledge only bore the fruit of unreality. Donatello did not achieve the typical except in his children: it was only in children that Michael Angelo failed. He missed this supreme opportunity; those on the roof of the Sistine Chapel are solemn and grown old with care: children without childhood. With Donatello all is different. His greatness and title to fame largely rest upon his typical childhood: his sculpture bears eloquent witness to the closest observation of all its varying and changeful moods. Others have excelled in this or that interpretation of child-life: Greuze with his sentimentalism, the Dutch painters with their stolidity. In Velasquez every child is the scion of some Royal House, in Murillo they are all beggars. They are too often stupid in Michelozzo: in Andrea della Robbia they are always sweet and winsome; Pigalle’s children know too much. Donatello alone grasped the whole psychology. He watched the coming generation, and foresaw all that it might portend: tragedy and comedy, labour and sorrow, work and play—plenty of play; and every problem of life is reflected and made younger by his chisel. How far the sculptors of the fifteenth century employed classical ideas is not easily determined. There was, however, one classical form which was widely used, namely, the flying putti holding a wreath or coat-of-arms between them: we find it on the frieze of the St. Louis niche, and it is repeated on Judith’s dress. The wreath or garland, of which the Greeks
[Footnote 141: Contract with Domopera of Siena. Payment for wax, for making the bronze figures for the Baptistery. 16, iv. 1428. Lusini, 38.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: The Cantoria.]
The Cantoria, or organ-loft, of the Florentine Cathedral
was ordered soon after Donatello’s return from
Rome, and was erected about 1441. It was placed
over one of the Sacristy doors, corresponding in position
with Luca della Robbia’s cantoria on the opposite
side of the choir. The ill-fortune which dispersed
the Paduan altar and Donatello’s work for the
facade likewise caused the removal of this gallery.
Late in the seventeenth century a royal marriage was
solemnised, for which an orchestra of unusual numbers
was required, and the two cantorie were removed
as inadequate. The large brackets remained in
Page 69
situ for some time, but were afterwards taken away
also. The two galleries have now been re-erected
at either end of the chief room of the Opera del Duomo.
But the size of the galleries is considerable, and
they occupy so much of the end walls to which they
are fixed, that it is impossible to see the sides or
outer panels of either cantoria. In the case
of Luca’s gallery, the side panels have been
replaced by facsimiles, and the originals can be minutely
examined, being only four or five feet from the ground,
and very suggestive they are. As the side panels
of Donatello’s gallery are equally invisible
in their present position they might also be brought
down to the eye level. Comparison with Luca’s
work would then be still more simplified. But
though in a trying light, and too low down, the sculpture
shows that it was Donatello who gave the more careful
attention to the conditions under which the work would
be seen. The delicacy and grace of Luca’s
choir make Donatello’s boys look coarse and
rough-hewn. But in the dim Cathedral, where Donatello’s
children would appear bold and vivacious, the others
would look insipid and weak. Moreover, the lower
tier of Luca’s panels beneath the projection
and enclosed by the broad brackets, would have been
in such a subdued light that some of the heads in
low-relief would have been scarcely emphasised at
all. In reconstructing Donatello’s gallery
an error has been made by which a long band of mosaic
runs along the whole length of the relief, above the
children’s heads. M. Reymond has pointed
out that the ground level should have been raised
in order to prevent what Donatello would undoubtedly
have avoided, namely, a blank and meaningless stretch
of mosaic.[142] M. Reymond’s brilliant suggestion
about a similar point in regard to the other cantoria,
a criticism which has been verified in a remarkable
manner, entitles his suggestion to great weight.
The angles of the cantoria where the side panels join
the main relief lack finish: something like the
pilasters which cover the angles of the Judith base
are required. As for the design, the gallery
made by Luca della Robbia has an advantage over Donatello’s
in that the figures are not placed behind a row of
columns. There is something tantalising in the
fact that the most boisterous and roguish of all the
troop is concealed by a pillar of spangled white and
gold. These pillars were perhaps needed to break
the long line of the relief: but they have no
such significance, as, for instance, the row of pillars
on the Saltarello tomb,[143] behind which the Bishop’s
effigy lies—a barrier between the living
and the dead, across which the attendant angels can
drop the curtain. Donatello’s gallery is,
perhaps, over-decorated. There is less gilding
now than formerly, and the complex ornament does not
materially interfere with the broad features of the
design: but a little more reserve would not have
been amiss.
[Footnote 142: Reymond, I., p. 107.]
[Footnote 143: By Nino Pisano, in Sta. Caterina, Pisa.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
THE PRATO PULPIT]
[Sidenote: The Prato Pulpit.]
The second work in which Donatello took his inspiration exclusively from childhood is at Prato. It is an external pulpit, fixed at the southern angle of the Cathedral facade, and employed to display the most famous relic possessed by the town, namely, the girdle of the Virgin. The first contract was made as early as 1428 with Donatello and Michelozzo, industriosi maestri, to whom careful measurements were given.[144] The sculptors promised to finish the work by September 1, 1429. Five years later, there was still no pulpit, and having vainly invoked the aid of Cosimo, they finally sent to Rome, where Donatello had by then gone, and a revised contract was made with the industrious sculptors, though Michelozzo is not mentioned by name.[145] The work was finished in about four years, and within three weeks of signing the new contract one of the reliefs was completed; it may, of course, have been already begun. Its success was immediate. “All say with one accord that never has such a work of art been seen before;” and the writer of the entertaining letter from which this eulogy is quoted goes on to say that Donatello is of good disposition; that such men are not found every day, and that he had better be encouraged by a little money.[146] The Prato pulpit has seven marble reliefs on mosaic grounds, separated by twin pilasters: there are thirty-two children in all.[147] It is a most attractive work, cleverly placed against the decorous little Cathedral and not surrounded by sculpture of the first order with which to make invidious comparisons. But beside the cantoria it is almost insignificant. The Prato children dance too, but without the perennial spring; they have plenty of movement, but seem apt to stumble. They do not scamper along with the feverish enthusiasm of the other children: they must get very tired. Moreover, several of the panels are confused. They are, of course, crowded, for Donatello liked crowds, especially for his children; but his crowds were well marshalled and the individual figures which composed them were not allowed to suffer by their surroundings anatomically. The Prato children belong to a chubby and robust type. They have a tendency to short necks and unduly big heads which sink on to the torso. Michelozzo never grasped the spirit of childhood; those at Montepulciano were not a success, and he was largely responsible for the Prato Pulpit; it has been suggested that Simone Ferrucci also assisted. Certainly it would be Michelozzo’s idea to divide the frieze into compartments, which interrupt the continuity of the relief and necessitate fourteen terminal points instead of four on the cantoria. We can also detect Michelozzo’s hand in the rather stiff and professional details of the architecture.
[Footnote 144: 14, vii. 1428.]
[Footnote 145: 27, v. 1434.]
[Footnote 146: Letter from Matteo degli Orghani, printed with the other documents in C. Guasti, opere, iv. 463-477.]
[Footnote 147: A pair of terra-cotta variants of these panels are preserved in the Wallace Collection at Hertford House.]
[Footnote 148: Psalm cl.]
[Footnote 149: Psalm cxlix.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
BARGELLO]
[Sidenote: Other Children by Donatello.]
There are six putti above the Annunciation in Santa Croce. They are made of terra-cotta, while the rest of the work is in stone, and designed in such a way that the children are superfluous. They are, however, undoubtedly by Donatello, and may have been added as an afterthought. Two stand on either side of the curved tympanum, clinging to each other as they look downwards, and afraid of falling over the steep precipice. Their attitude is shy and timid, as Leonardo said was advisable when making little children standing still.[150] Though unnecessary, their presence on the relief is justified by Donatello’s skill and humour. In the great reliefs at Padua, Siena and Lille he introduces them without any specific object, though he contrives that they shall show fear or surprise in response to the incident portrayed. It is puzzling to know what the bronze boy in the Bargello should be called. Perseus, Mercury, Cupid, Allegory and Amorino have been suggested: he combines attributes of them all together with the budding tail of a faun, and the gambali, the buskin-trouser of the Tuscan peasant[151]—“vestito in un certo modo bizzarro” as Vasari says. Cinelli thought it classical, and it resembles an undoubted antique in the Louvre. Donatello has clearly taken classical motives; the winged feet and the serpents twining between them are not Renaissance in form or idea. But the statue itself is closely akin to the Cantoria children, but being in bronze shows a higher polish, and, moreover, is treated in a less summary fashion. It is a brilliant piece of bronze: colour, cast and chiselling are alike admirable, and there is a vibration in the movement as the saucy little fellow looks up laughing, having presumably just shot off an arrow; or possibly he has been twanging a wire drawn tightly between the fingers. It throws much light on the bronze boys at Padua made ten or fifteen years later. This Florentine boy shows how completely Donatello, perhaps with the assistance of a caster, could render his meaning in bronze. In two or three cases at Padua the work is clumsy and slipshod, showing how he allowed his assistants to take liberties which he would never have countenanced in work finished by his own hands. The Bargello has another Amorino of bronze, a nude winged boy standing on a cockleshell, and just about to fly away; quite a pleasing statuette, and executed with skill except as regards the extremities of the fingers, where the bronze has failed. It resembles Donatello’s
[Footnote 150: “Trattato della Pintura,” Richter, i. 291.]
[Footnote 151: This open form of trouser, of which one sees a variant on the Martelli David, was also classical. The Athis or Phrygian shepherd usually wears something of the kind.]
[Footnote 152: Very similar classical types are in the British Museum, No. 1147; and the Eros springing forward in the Forman Collection (dispersed in 1899) is almost identical.]
[Footnote 153: From the Piot Collection. Figured in “Gaz. des Beaux Arts,” 1890, iii. 410.]
[Footnote 154: Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 475, 1864. A winged boy carrying a dolphin.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
FAENZA MUSEUM]
[Sidenote: Boys’ Busts.]
It is inexplicable that modern criticism should withdraw from Donatello all the free-standing or portrait-busts of boys, while going to the opposite extreme in ascribing to him an enormous number of Madonnas. We know that Donatello was passionately fond of carving children on his reliefs: we also know that only two versions of the Madonna can be really authenticated as his work. Why should Donatello have made no busts of boys when it is not denied that he was responsible for something like one hundred boys in full-length; and how does it come about that scores of Madonnas should be attributed to him when we only have the record of a few? There can be no doubt that Donatello would not have rested content with children in relief or in miniature. The very preparation of his numerous works in this category must have led him to make busts as well, quite apart from his own inclinations. The stylistic method of argument should not be abused: if driven to a strict and logical conclusion it becomes misleading. It ignores the human element in the artist. It pays no attention to his desire to vary the nature of his work or to make experiments. It eliminates the likelihood of forms which differ from the customary type, and it makes no allowance for possibilities or probabilities, least of all for mistakes. It is purely on stylistic grounds that each bust connected with Donatello’s name has been withdrawn from the list of his works. A fashion had grown up to ascribe to Donatello all that delightful group of marble busts now scattered over Europe. Numbers were obviously the work of competent but later men: Rossellino, Desiderio, Mino da Fiesole, and so forth. There remain others which are more doubtful, but which in one detail or another are alleged to be un-Donatellesque, and have therefore been fearlessly attributed to other sculptors from whose authenticated work they often dissent. That, however, was immaterial, the primary object being to disinherit Donatello without much thought as to his lawful successor in title. A critical discrimination between these busts was an admitted need; everything of the kind had been conventionally ascribed to Donatello
[Footnote 155: In Grosvenor House. Bronze; generally known as “The Laughing Boy.”]
[Footnote 156: Its proportion is impaired by the basal drapery, which was grafted to the statue at a later date. This bust belonged to Sabba da Castiglione, who was very proud of it. He was born within twenty years of Donatello’s death.]
[Footnote 157: No. 383. Marble. Goupil Bequest.]
[Footnote 158: Stucco, No. 38A. Cf. also one belonging to Herr Richard von Kaufmann, Berlin.]
[Footnote 159: No. 1274, St. John, Florentine School, a painting.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
BARGELLO, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: Niccolo da Uzzano and Polychromacy.]
The bust of Niccolo da Uzzano has gained its widespread popularity from its least genuine feature—namely, the paint with which it is disfigured. The daubs of colour give it a fictitious importance, an actual realism which invests it with the illusion of living flesh and blood. This is all the more unfortunate, as the bust is a remarkable work, and does not gain by being made into a “speaking likeness.” Its merits can best be appreciated in a cast, where the form is reproduced without the dubious embellishments of later times. Niccolo was a high-minded patrician, an implacable opponent of the Medici, and a warm friend of higher education: it is also of interest that he should have been an executor of the will of John XXIII. He was born in 1359, and died in 1432. The bust is made of terra-cotta, and shows a man of sixty-five or so, and would therefore be coeval with the later Campanile prophets (but nothing beyond old tradition can be accepted as authority for the nomenclature). The modelling of the head is quite masterly. Niccolo is looking rather to the left; his keen and hawklike countenance, and his piercing eyes, deep set and quivering within pendulous eyelids, give a sense of invincible logic and penetration. The laconic, matter-of-fact mouth, and the resolute jaw add strength and courage to the physiognomy: the nose and its disdainful nostrils are those of the haughty optimate. The head is, however, less fine than the face: a skull of rather common proportions, and a sloping though broad forehead are its marked features. Donatello has given him an ugly ear; Niccolo’s ear was, therefore, ugly, and the throat is swollen. The shoulders are covered with a thick piece of drapery, leaving the throat and upper part of the breast bare. Such is the impression conveyed by Niccolo in the cast. In the Bargello the colouring modifies what the form itself was meant to suggest. The smallest error of a paint-brush, the slightest deepening of a pigment, are quite sufficient to make radical alterations in the sentiment of a statue. When applied to plastic art, colour is potent enough to change the
[Footnote 160: Cf. Naples Museum, No. 5592.]
[Footnote 161: Cf. drawings of facades in Vettorio Ghiberti’s Note-book.]
[Footnote 162: Bargello Cortile, No. 3, by Niccolo di Piero.]
[Footnote 163: Borghini, in 1586, gave a curious recipe for colouring marble according to antique rules. Florentine ed. 1730, p. 123.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Portrait-busts.]
It is a singular fact admitting of no ready explanation that portrait-busts, so common in Tuscany, should scarcely have existed in Venice. Florence was their native home. From the time of Donatello every sculptor of note was responsible for one or more, while certain artists made it a regular occupation. Luca della Robbia, however, one of the most consummate sculptors of his day, made no portrait except the effigy of Bishop Federighi. There are one or two small heads in the Bargello, but they scarcely come within the category of studied portraits, while the heads on the bronze doors of the Duomo, though modelled from living people, are small and purely decorative in purpose. Glazed terra-cotta was a material so admirably adapted to showing the refinements of feature and character, as we can see in both Luca’s and Andrea’s work, that this absence is all the more surprising. At the same time, numerous as portrait-statues were in Tuscany, they do not compare in numbers with those executed in classical times. In the fifteenth century the statue was a work of art, and its actual carving was an integral part of the art: so the replica in sculpture was rare. But under the Roman Empire statues of the same man were erected in scores and hundreds in the same city; their multiplication became a profession in itself, and a large class of artisans must have grown up, eternally copying and recopying portrait-busts and giving them the haunting dulness of mechanical reproductions.
[Footnote 164: It used to be over one of the doors, preserved in una custodia which Richa thought ought to have been made of crystal, so precious was the bust.—“Ch. Fiorentine,” 1758, v. 39.]
[Footnote 165: Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 7585, 1861.]
An effective counterpart to this bust exists in Berlin. It is also a life-sized bronze of an older man, and in many ways the likeness to the Gonzaga bust is notable. But wherever Gonzaga’s features lack distinction this portrait shows fine qualities and good breeding. Nothing could better illustrate how minute are the plastic details which will revolutionise a countenance; how easily noble and handsome features can degenerate into what is sordid and vulgar. In this bust the chin, though receding, is far from weak; the lips are full but not sensual; the nose has the faint aquiline curve of distinction. There is benevolence in the eyes, meditation in the brow, dignity and reserve throughout the physiognomy: it is the portrait of a man who may be great, but who must be good. When a bronze abozzo has to be finished the detail is added by hammering the metal, or incising it with gravers. Thus the bronze has to be reduced, it being seldom possible to enlarge it at any point. But the Gonzaga bust would require to be enlarged in several places to make it a lifelike head. In the case of the portrait just described, the metal was cast from a rough sketch which, in the first place, had the qualities of a living and consistent head,
[Footnote 166: Bargello, No. 18, and No. 6, life-sized bronze.]
[Footnote 167: Bargello, 17.]
[Footnote 168: Gaye, i. 121.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Relief-portraits.]
A few portraits in relief require a word of notice. As a rule they are later in date, though they are often given to Donatello. It became fashionable to have one’s portrait made as a Roman celebrity: an Antonine for instance; a Galba or a Faustina; or as some statesman, like Scipio or Caesar. Donatello was not responsible for these portraits, though several have been attributed to him. But he made one or two such reliefs, such as the little St. John in the Bargello which has already been described. The oval-topped portrait in the same collection, made of pietra serena—a clean-shaved man with longish hair and an aquiline nose, is wrongly ascribed to Donatello. There is a much more interesting portrait, two copies of which exist; one is in London, the other in Milan.[169] It is a relief-portrait of a woman in profile to the right; her neck and breast
[Footnote 169: Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 923, 1900, and Museo Archeologico, No. 1681, both marble.]
[Footnote 170: Nos. 585 and 758.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: San Lorenzo.]
Donatello must have completed the most important decorative work in the Sacristy of San Lorenzo by 1443. Brunellesco was the architect, and there were differences between them as to their respective spheres of work. Donatello made the bronze doors, a pair of large reliefs, four large circular medallions of the Evangelists, as well as four others of scenes from the life of St. John the Evangelist. Excluding the doors, everything is made of terra-cotta. The reliefs over the inner doors of the Sacristy represent St. Stephen and St. Laurence on one side, and St. Cosmo and St. Damian on the other. They are nearly life size, modelled in rather low-relief upon panels with circular tops, and of exceptional size for works in terra-cotta. The reliefs are enclosed in Donatello’s framework of latish Renaissance design, but the figures themselves are very simple. There is a minimum of ornament, and they harmonise with the remarkable scheme of the bronze doors below them, with which they have so many points in common. The ceiling of the chapel has been repeatedly whitewashed, and the eight medallions are consequently blurred in surface and outline. It is a real misfortune, for, so far as one can judge, they contain compositions and
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
SAN LORENZO, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: The Bronze Doors.]
There is no more instructive study than the bronze doors of Italian churches. They are the earliest specimens of bronze casting to be found in Italy of Christian times; they show the gradual transition from Eastern to Western forms of art, and they were usually made by the most prominent sculptor of the day. Their size is considerable, they are frequently dated, and their condition is often extraordinarily good. Donatello’s are relatively small, but they adhere to the best traditions. Excluding the great doors made by Luca della Robbia for the Sacristy of the Duomo, these in San Lorenzo are among the latest which were produced according to the ancient model and the correct idea. Thenceforward the doors ceased to be doors; the reliefs ceased to show the qualities of bronze, and disregarded the principles of sculpture. Donatello made two pairs of doors, one on either side of the altar. The doors open in the middle; there are thus four long-hinged panels of bronze, and each panel has five reliefs upon it. It is doubtful if the most archaic doors in Italy show such uniformity of design, for all the twenty bronze reliefs illustrate one single theme, namely, the conversation of two standing men. The panels simply consist of two saints, roughly sketched in somewhat low-relief upon an absolutely flat background: there is great variety in the drapery, and some of the figures might come out of thirteenth-century illuminations. Never was a monotonous motive invested with such variety of treatment: never was simplicity better attained by scrupulous elimination. Donatello’s symmetrical idea had been previously employed, and Torrigiano put his figures in couples on what Bacon called one of the “stateliest and daintiest monuments of Europe."[171] Luca della Robbia put his figures in threes on the Cathedral gates, a seated figure in the centre, with a standing figure on either side. But Donatello had to make twice as many panels as Luca. Martyrs, apostles and confessors are talking on the San Lorenzo doors. Thus St. Stephen shows the stone of his martyrdom to St. Laurence. Elsewhere St. Peter’s movement suggests that he is upbraiding his fellow, for the argument excites these saints. They gesticulate freely; martyrs seem to fence with their palm-leaves. One will turn away abruptly, another will pay sudden attention to his book, while his companion continues to talk. One man slaps his book to clinch the discussion, another jots down a note; two others are ending their controversy and prepare to leave—in opposite directions. But, though these are literal descriptions of the scenes, there is no levity; everything is ordained according to Donatello’s strict formula. He was none the less determined to adhere to the old conventional and non-pictorial treatment of the gates, and at the same time to give animation to every panel. In this he has succeeded, but the symmetrical arrangement
[Footnote 171: “Life of Henry VII.,” ed. 1825, iii. 417.]
[Footnote 172: See Westmacott’s lectures on Sculpture, II. III., Athenaeum, 1858.]
[Footnote 173: 2nd Comm. Vasari, I. xxx.]
[Footnote 174: Letter of 1739, p. 186.]
[Footnote 175: 17, viii. 1549, Antonio Doni, printed in Bottari, iii. 341.]
[Footnote 176: These dialogues will be found at great length in Borghini, Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci, Alberti, &c. Castiglione also devotes a canto of the “Cortegiano” to the subject.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
LOGGIA DEI LANZI, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: The Judith.]
The bronze statue of Judith was probably made shortly before Donatello’s journey to Padua. It is his only large bronze group, and its faults are accentuated by the most unfortunate position it occupies in the lofty Loggia de’ Lanzi. It was meant to be the centrepiece of some large fountain. The triangular base, and the extremities of the mattress on which Holofernes sits, have spouts from which the water would issue, though the bronze is not worn away by the action of water. As we see the statue now, it looks small and dwarfed. In a courtyard it would look far more imposing, and when it came from Donatello’s workshop, placed upon a pedestal designed for it, its present incongruities would have been absent. For instance, the feet of Holofernes would have been upheld by something from below, as the marks in the bronze indicate. With all its disadvantages, the statue is extremely interesting. Judith stands over Holofernes. With her left hand she holds him up by clutching his hair: her right arm is uplifted, in which she holds the sword. The action seems arrested during a moment of suspense: one doubts if the sword will ever fall. Judith, who was the ideal of courage and beauty, seems to hesitate; there is nothing to show that her arm is meant to descend, except her inexorable face—and even that is full of sadness and regrets. It is more dramatic that this should be so. Cellini’s Perseus close by has already committed his murder. The crisis has passed, the blood spurts from the severed head and trunk of the Medusa; so we have squalid details instead of the overpowering sense of impending tragedy. With Cellini there was no room for mystery: no imagination could be left to the spectator. “Celui qui nous dict tout nous saousle et nous degouste.” Holofernes is an amazing example of Donatello’s power. He is a really drunken man: we see it in the comatose fall of the limbs, in the drooping features, the languid inanition of the arms. The veins throb in his hands and feet: the spine has ceased to be rigid, and were it not for the support of Judith’s hands buried in his hair, he would topple over inanimate. The treatment of the bronze is successful and its patina is admirable. Judith’s drapery, it is true, has a restless crackling appearance. It is furrowed into small and rather fussy folds, almost suggesting, like the figures of the Parthenon pediment, the pleats of wetted linen on a lay figure. Judith’s arm is overweighted by the heavy sleeve. There are, however, pleasing details, especially the band of embroidery over her breast decorated with the flying putti; and her veil, Michael Angelesque in its way, is treated with skill and distinction. The base consists of three bronze reliefs joined into a triangle, separated at each angle by a narrow bronze plaque, beyond which is a curved pilaster giving extra support to the figures above. These reliefs are bacchic in idea and Renaissance in execution. Children dance, play and sleep around the mask from
There are only four life-sized statues of women by Donatello: this Judith, the Magdalen, the St. Justina, and the Madonna at Padua. The Dovizia is lost, and she was treated as an emblematic personage. These figures and the statuettes at Siena show that, although not accustomed to make female statues, Donatello was perfectly competent to do so. The little Eve, on the back of the Madonna’s throne at Padua—the only nude figure of a woman he ever made, and here only in relief—is exquisite in sentiment and form. The statue of Judith had an adventurous life. After the revolution in 1495, the group was removed from the Medici palace to the Ringhiera of the Palazzo Pubblico, and the words of warning against tyranny were engraved on its new base: “Exemplum salutis publicae cives posuere, 1495.” Judith was the type of nationalism, the heroine of a war of independence: and this mark of the Florentine love of liberty has lasted to our own day. No Medici dared to obliterate the ominous words. Donatello was not much in politics: his father had taken too violent a share in the feuds of his day, and narrowly escaped execution. Nor was Donatello’s art coloured by politics: the Florentines did not give commissions like the Sienese for allegorical representations of the life and duties of citizenship. Differing from Michael Angelo, Donatello made no Brutus; he did not concentrate the political tragedies of his day into a Penseroso and
[Footnote 177: Gotti, “Vita,” i. 66.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
BAPTISTERY, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: The Magdalen and similar Statues.]
We have now to consider a group of rugged statues differing in date but animated by the same motive, the Magdalen in Florence and three statues of St. John the Baptist in Siena, Venice, and Berlin. Of these, the Magdalen in the Baptistery at Florence is the most typical and the most uncompromising. She stands upright, a mass of tattered rags, haggard, emaciated, almost toothless. Her matted hair falls down in thick knots; all feminine softness has gone from the limbs, and nothing but the drawn muscles remain. It is a thin wasted form, piteous in expression, painful in all its ascetic excess. The Magdalen has, of course, been the subject of hostile criticism. It gives a shock, it inspires horror: it is an outrage on every well-clothed and prosperous sinner.[178] In point of fact, Donatello’s summary method of carving the wood has given a harshness and asperity to features which in themselves are not displeasing. In a dimmed light, or looking with unfocused eyes on the reproduction, it is clear that the structural lines of the face were once well favoured. But from the beginning the Magdalen was a work which made a profound impression, and its popularity is measured by the number of statues of a like nature. Charles VIII. wanted to buy it in 1498, but the Florentines thought it priceless and hid it away. Two years later they had the bronze diadem added by Jacopo Sogliani.[179] Finally, at a period when this type of sculpture with all its appeal to the traditions of the Thebaid, was least likely to have been acceptable in art or exemplar, the statue was placed in a niche above an altar erected on purpose for its reception, where an inscription testifies to the regard in which it was then held.[180] This Magdalen is didactic in purpose. Donatello seems to have given less attention to the modelling, subtle as it is, than to the concentration of the one absorbing lesson which was to be conveyed to the spectator. His object was to show repentance,
[Footnote 178: Rumour was very severe. “Elle m’a pour toujours degoute de la penitence,” sighed Des Brosses. This inimitable person was the critic who, after visiting the Arena chapel at Padua, observed that nowadays one would scarcely employ Giotto to paint a tennis-court.]
[Footnote 179: Richa, III., xxxiii.]
[Footnote 180: The inscription is: “Votis publicis S. Mariae Magdalenae simulacrum ejus insigne Donati opus pristino loco elegantiario repositum anno 1735.”]
[Footnote 181: See p. 199. Moreover, in 1458 Donatello accepted a commission at Siena for a marble San Bernardino. And the Anonimo Morelliano mentions four other marble reliefs at Padua.]
[Illustration: Alinari
FRARI CHURCH, VENICE]
The statues of St. John at Siena, Berlin, and Venice[182] are closely analogous to the Magdalen. St. John is the ascetic prophet who spent years in seclusion, returning from the desert to preach repentance. These three figures have one curious feature in common—a flavour of the Orient. The St. John is some fakir, some Buddhist saint. Asiatic as the Baptist was, it is seldom that Italian art gave him so Eastern a type; but the explanation is simply that Donatello evolved his own idea of what a self-centred and fasting mystic would resemble, and his conception happens to coincide with the outcome of similar conditions actually put into practice elsewhere. The Berlin bronze is St. John as Baptist, the others show him with the scroll as Precursor. He always wears the camel’s-hair tunic, which ends just below the knee; at Siena it is thick, like some woolly fleece; it conceals and broadens the frame, thus suggesting a stoutness which is not warranted by the size of the leg. The modelling of legs and arms in these statues is noteworthy. They are thin, according to Donatello’s idea of his subject; and though the thinness takes the natural form of slender circumference, one sees that the limb with its angular modelling and its flat surfaces has become thin: the thinness is explained by the character. The feet of the Siena bronze are exceptionally good; the wrist and forearm of the Venice figure are admirable. The Siena Baptist is nearly life-sized, and was made in 1457. He is the least introspective of the three, a mature strong man, and the oldest of the many Baptists Donatello made. The Berlin figure is the flushed eccentric, holding up the cup he used in baptizing. The figure is half the size of life, and was doubtless one of the numerous statuettes which crowned fonts. It has been suggested that this bronze, which is defective in several places, was commissioned for the Cathedral of Orvieto in 1423.[183] But the type would appear more advanced than the busts on the Mandorla doorway or the Siena work made about this time. Moreover, the contract specifies a St. John cum signo crucis et demonstratione ecce agnus Dei. A Baptist was made at the same time for Ancona, and is now lost. On first seeing the St. John in Venice one’s impression is to laugh. But he is not really a wild man of the woods—he is simply covered with and made grotesque by thick masses of oil paint. A close examination of the figure shows that in some places the paint is over a quarter of an inch thick, and the last coating it has received is glutinous in quality, and has been laid on with such freedom that the position and shape of certain features are altered. But if seen close at hand, the statue (which it is understood will shortly be cleaned) shows distinct merits. The modelling of the extremities is good, and though it is clear that Donatello was never quite willing to treat St. John as on a par with the other Saints, we have a systematic and generic rendering of his
[Footnote 182: Siena Cathedral, bronze; Berlin Museum, bronze; Frari Church, Venice, wood.]
[Footnote 183: 10, ii. 1423. On 29, iv. 1423, Donatello received 5 lbs. 3 oz. of wax for modelling the figure. Luzi, “Duomo di Orvieto,” 1867, p. 406.]
[Footnote 184: Vasari, i. 147.]
[Footnote 185: Che niuno maestro di legname possa fare di pietra. Rules of Sculptors of Sienna, 1441, ch. 39. Milanesi, i. 120.]
[Footnote 186: In Museum. From the Capella Manfredi in San Girolamo degli Osservanza outside the town, suppressed in 1866. Cf. two similar statuettes in terra-cotta, Bargello, Nos. 174 and 175.]
[Footnote 187: Louvre, about 12 inches high, unnumbered. Museo Archeologico, Venice, No. 8. Frau Hainauer’s bronze Baptist, signed by Francesco di San Gallo, is interesting in this connection.]
[Footnote 188: Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 157, 1894.]
[Footnote 189: Ibid. No. 7605, 1861, terra-cotta. Louvre, No. 465, ditto.]
[Footnote 190: Cf. Herr von Beckerath’s in Berlin, and the Verrocchio-school Magdalen in the Berlin Gallery, No. 94.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Altar at Padua.]
Donatello was fifty-seven when he left Florence in 1443 to spend ten eventful years at Padua. There he carried out his masterpieces of bronze for the Cathedral and the equestrian statue of Gattamelata on the Piazza opposite Donatello’s little house, which to this day is occupied, appropriately enough, by a carver—Bortolo Slaviero, tagliapietra. It is now established that Donatello was invited to Padua for the Church and that the Gattamelata was not commissioned until later.[191] At this time Padua was a centre of humanistic learning and intellectual activity. There was a hive of antiquarians and collectors, and, according to its lights, a thriving school of painters.[192] The Florentine Palla Strozzi was living there in retirement, and he may have been partly responsible for the invitation to Donatello. But the indigenous art of Padua was dependent on Venice, and needed some fertilising element. Squarcione with his 140 pupils founded his art upon traditional and conventional data: had it not been for Donatello and the radical changes which resulted from his sojourn at Padua, a fossilised school would have become firmly rooted, and would probably have influenced the whole of the Veneto. Mantegna was still young when Donatello arrived, and though there is no reason to suppose that he received work from Donatello as Squarcione did, it is clear that, without this influx of Southern ideas, he would have had some difficulty in shaking off the conventionalisms of his home. But though Donatello’s immediate influence on Paduan art was decisive (and its ramifications soon extended to Venice), he was himself influenced by his fresh surroundings, and his native bent towards complexity was increased. He assimilated many of the local likes and dislikes. If Gattamelata had been erected in some Florentine square there would have been less ornament; if Colleone had been commissioned for Siena there would have been less braggadocio. Leonardo never recovered his Tuscan frame of mind after his sojourn in Milan. Donatello himself realised these novelties to the full, and their results upon his art. While he was making the intricate bas-reliefs, the selective genius of Luca della Robbia was composing the Florence Lunettes,[193] monumental in their simplicity. And though Vasari records the enthusiasm with which Donatello’s productions were greeted in the North, the sculptor recognised the dangers of unqualified praise, and said he must return home to Florence to receive criticism and censure, the stimulus to better work and greater glory. But the maggiore gloria was not to be attained.
[Footnote 191: Michael Angelo Gloria; Donatello Fiorentino e le sue opere ... a Padova, 1895, from which the dates are all quoted.]
[Footnote 192: See Kristeller’s Mantegna, translated by S.A. Strong, 1901, p. 17.]
[Footnote 193: Over the Sacristy doors in the Cathedral.]
[Footnote 194: Anonimo Morelliano (1520-40). Ed. of Bassano, 1800, p. 3. E da dietro l’altar sotto il scabello il Cristo morto, con le altre figure a circo, e le due figure da man destra con le altre due da man sinistra, pur de basso rilevo, ma de marmo, furono de mano de Donatello.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
SANT’ ANTONIO, PADUA]
[Sidenote: The Large Statues.]
Of the seven large free-standing statues, that of the Madonna and Child worthily occupies the central position. Nobody was more modern than Donatello, nobody less afraid of innovation. But in this Madonna he went back to archaic ideas, and we have a conception analogous to the versions of the two previous centuries:[195] indeed, his idea is still older, for there is something Byzantine in this liturgical Madonna, who gazes straight in front of her, and far down the nave of the Santo—a church with mosque-like domes, like those of the early Eastern architects. The Child is seated in her lap, as in the earliest representation of the subject: here, however, the Christ is a child, with an element of helplessness almost indicated, whereas the primitive idea had been to show the vigour and often the features of a biggish boy. Donatello’s version is much more pathetic, as the little Christ raises a tiny hand in benediction. The Virgin herself is of unequalled solemnity, while her young and gracious face, exquisite in expression and contour, is full of queenly beauty. But there is still this atmosphere of mystery, an enigmatic aloofness in spite of the warm human sentiment. The Sphinx’s faces, with all their traditions of secrecy, contribute their share to the cryptic environment. Donatello uses them as the supports of the throne on which the Madonna is seated; behind it are Adam and Eve in relief: in front she herself shows the New Adam to the multitude, on whom he confers his blessing. St. Francis of Padua [Transcriber’s Note: Should be “Assisi.”] stands on the right of the Madonna, as founder of the Order, and taking precedence of St. Anthony, to whom the church is dedicated. He holds the crucifix and the book of rules. He is draped in the ordinary Franciscan habit, which falls round his feet, giving a stiffness to the figure as seen in profile, and making him appear rather short when seen from the front. The workmanship is good, the hands, with lightly shown stigmata, being excellent; but the lack of distinction in the figure makes one look more closely at the head, which is modelled with great power and freedom, showing that Donatello still possessed the vigour and penetration for which the Campanile prophets are notable. The head is full of character; not perhaps what one would expect from the apostle of self-abnegation: but it is determined, strong in the mouth and broad chin. It was, of course, only meant to be seen a few feet from the ground, and the lines do not compare in depth with the Habbakuk or the Zuccone; but there is none the less an analogy in the manner by which Donatello calls in the assistance of light and shade to add tone and finish to the modelling. St. Anthony was a deservedly popular saint in Padua, where he preached and denounced the local tyrant; and he may be accounted the greatest man of Portuguese birth. But Donatello does not seem to have found the subject very inspiring. He has taken his idea from rather an ordinary friar
[Footnote 195: Cf., for instance, the Madonna over the door of the Pisa Baptistery.]
[Footnote 196: Cf. drawings of ewers in Uffizzi by Giacomone da Faenza, sixteenth century.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
SANT’ ANTONIO, PADUA]
[Illustration: Alinari
SANT’ ANTONIO, PADUA]
[Illustration: Alinari
SANT’ ANTONIO, PADUA]
[Sidenote: The Bronze Reliefs.]
The four panels of Miracles take the highest rank among Donatello’s bas-reliefs. Their size is considerable, being about four feet long. They have one theme in common, namely, the supernatural gifts of St. Anthony and the veneration of the populace. Donatello’s crowds are admirable; they are deep crowds. The people are rather hot and jostling each other: they stand on benches or stairs in order to get a better view of what is proceeding. The edges of the crowds, where the people are too far off to be active spectators, lose interest in the central incident; they gossip as bystanders or sit down: often they are shown actually leaving the place. It is singular how ill-designed many of the classical crowds are, especially the battle-scenes: they are constructed without regard for the human necessity of standing on something; and we have grotesque topsy-turvy compositions, the individual parts of which are unrivalled in technique.[197] Michael Angelo’s first and last representation of a crowd in sculpture shows the same fault, which, indeed, was far from uncommon.[198] It arose from a desire to show more of the crowd than could be naturally seen from the eye level, and the whole relief was consequently covered with figures, the background proper being suppressed. In these Paduan reliefs Donatello manages to give ample density and variety, and there is never any doubt as to the ownership of legs or arms. His early relief at Siena, on the other hand, has a group
[Footnote 197: Cf. Battle of Romans and Barbarians, No. 12. Museo Nazionale, Rome.]
[Footnote 198: Battle, Casa Buonarroti, Florence.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
SANT’ ANTONIO, PADUA]
[Sidenote: The Symbols of the Evangelists.]
There are four other bronze reliefs, the Symbols of the Evangelists. Donatello has contrived to invest these somewhat awkward themes with alternate drama and poetry. The emblems of Ezekiel’s vision were too intricate for Western art, and long before the fifteenth century they had been reduced to the simple forms of the lion, ox, eagle and angel, with no attribute except wings. All four reliefs are rectangular, about eighteen inches square. The ox is, of course, the least inspiring, and here as elsewhere is treated in a dry perfunctory manner. The oxen on the facade of Laon Cathedral offered some scope to the sculptor, being life-sized; but in a small relief the subject was not attractive. The lion is more vigorously treated. As a work of natural history he is better than the Marzocco, and he has a certain heraldic extravagance as well. The limbs have tension, the muscles are made of steel, and there is strength and watchfulness, attributes which led the early architects to rest the pilasters of the pulpit and portal upon lions’ backs. But the eagle of St. John is superb, even grander than the famous classical marble of the same subject.[199] It has the broad expanse of wings, vibrating as though the bird were about to take flight: the long lithe body with its soft pectoral feathers, the striking claws, and the flattened head with cruel gleaming eye, all combine to give a terribilita which is, perhaps, unsurpassed in all the countless versions of the symbol. But the drama of the eagle is eclipsed by the quiet unostentatious poetry of the angel of St. Matthew. We see a girl of intense grace and refinement, winged as an angel and looking modestly downwards to the open gospel in her hands. Delicacy is the keynote pervading every detail of the relief: in her hands, arms and throat, in the soft curves of the young frame, and in the drapery itself, which suggests all that is dainty and pure—everywhere, in fact, we find charm and tenderness, rare even in a man like Ghiberti, almost unique in Donatello.
[Footnote 199: The Walpole Eagle from the Tiber, belonging to the Earl of Wemyss.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Choir of Angels.]
In the original contract with Donatello, ten angels were commissioned, and were exhibited on the provisional wooden altar (13, vi. ’48). It appears, however, that they were insufficient, and two more panels were ordered. These may possibly be the reliefs in each of which a couple of angels are represented singing, certainly the most successful of all. There is a palpable inequality in the remainder. They not only show differences of treatment in the details of drapery, chiselling and general decoration, but there is a substantial lack of harmony in their broad conception. It is impossible to believe that the two angels leaning inwards against the edge of the relief (the fourth respectively from either end of the altar) could have been modelled by Donatello.
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
SANT’ ANTONIO, PADUA]
[Illustration: Alinari
SANT’ ANTONIO, PADUA]
[Illustration: CHRIST MOURNED BY ANGELS
LONDON]
[Sidenote: The Pieta and the Entombment.]
The remaining work for the high altar consists of a marble Entombment and a bronze relief of Christ mourned by Angels, treated as a Pieta. The tabernacle door, which occupies the centre of the high altar, differs in shape, quality and design from everything else, and is wholly unworthy of its prominent position. The lower relief is, however, a work of exceptional interest. It is placed in the centre of the frontal with the reliefs of choristers on either side of it, a tragic culmination to all the happy children around it. The Christ is resting upright in the tomb, half of the figure only being visible. The head
[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
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
Page 107
de lo alabastro (13, viii. 46). Employment
was also given to Jacomo, a goldsmith (9, v. 48),
to Squarcione the painter (21, xi. 47), to Moscatelo,
the maker of majolica (v. 49), and to Giovanni da
Becato, who made a metal grille behind the altar.
Francesco del Mayo and Andrea delle Caldiere were
the chief bronze casters; a dozen or fifteen other
names are recorded. None of these can have had
much influence on the sculpture itself; but there
were men of greater calibre, Giovanni da Pisa, Urbano
da Cortona, Antonio Celino of Pisa, and Francesco Valente
of Florence. Though called garzoni and
disipoli of Donatello (June and Sept. 47),
they soon became men of trained capacity, and were
specifically mentioned in some of the contracts.
Thus it appears that each was entrusted with one of
the evangelist’s symbols; they were also largely
responsible for the bronze choristers (27, iv. 46).
Their whims and idiosyncrasies are visible in many
particulars: in the halos for instance.
The gospel emblems all have halos, likewise most of
the singing children, whereas there are none on the
Madonna and the great statues of canonised saints
on the altar. But it is impossible here to enter
upon the most interesting problem of their respective
shares on the altar sculpture, and how far they were
independent of Donatello beyond the chiselling and
polishing of the bronze; the subject would need discussion
at too great length. It is, however, worth while
to refer to some of their work, for which they were
exclusively responsible. Thus the Fulgosio tomb
in the Santo, and the superaltar in the Eremitani
at Padua (though much disfigured by paint), show that
Giovanni da Pisa was influenced by Donatello to a remarkable
degree. The composition of the altar consists
of a broad relief of the Madonna with three saints
on either side of her: below it is a predella
divided into three panels; above, a frieze of dancing
children similar to those on the pulpits of San Lorenzo.
The composition is crowned by a tympanum and putti
suggested by Donatello’s Annunciation.
Several of the larger figures might almost be the
work of Donatello, though the personality of Giovanni
makes itself felt throughout. Urbano of Cortona
was another interesting man. He received a commission
to decorate the chapel of the Madonna delle Grazie
in the Sienese Cathedral,[204] and he had to make the
Symbols of the Evangelists: nel fregio ...
si debi fare IIII. evangelisti in forma d’animali.
Donatello himself, excellentissimus sculptor, seu
magister sculture,[205] was commissioned later
on to work in this chapel; but there can be no doubt
that the angel of St. Matthew, now preserved in the
Opera del Duomo,[206] is the work of Urbano. It
is the identical design of the emblem on the Paduan
altar, pleasant in its way, but differing in all the
material elements of charm; but it is an important
document in that it shows a further stage in the evolution
of Donatello through the hand of a painstaking pupil.
[Footnote 203: 7, xii. 1549. Printed in Bottari, ii. 70.]
[Footnote 204: 19, x. 1451. Milanesi, ii. 271.]
[Footnote 205: 17. x. 1457; ibid. 295.]
[Footnote 206: Marble, No. 149.]
[Footnote 207: The rules of the Sienese guild of painters provided against strife within their own circles by imposing a fine upon whoever dicesse vilania o parole ingiuriose al retore: Art. 55. Milanesi, i. 25.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
PADUA]
[Illustration: Alinari
SANT’ ANTONIO, PADUA]
[Illustration: SHRINE OF ST. JUSTINA
LONDON]
[Sidenote: Bellano and the Gattamelata Tombs.]
One other sculptor, Bellano, is said by Vasari to have been so much affected by Donatello’s influence that the work of the two men was often indistinguishable. This places Bellano too high. Scardeone, it is true, says he was mirus coelatura;[208] but Gauricus is more accurate in calling him ineptus artifex.[209] He was really a lugubrious person, though on rare occasions he made a good thing, such, for instance, as the statuette of St. Jerome, belonging to M. Gustave Dreyfus. But his large bas-relief of St. Anthony and the Mule[210] is stiff and laboured. The tomb of Roycelli, the monarcha sapientie in the Santo, with its wealth of poverty-stricken decoration, shows that Bellano was a man who could work on a large scale, but whose sense of fitness and harmony was weak. So also the Roccabonella fragments, in spite of a rugged, rough-hewn appearance, show an absence of ethical and intellectual qualities; while the fussy and breathless reliefs round the choir of the Santo are farcical in several respects. There was another man influenced by Donatello, who must be nameless pending further investigation: his style cannot be identified with anything on the great altar, but he was a sculptor of immense power. He made the so-called shrine of Santa Giustina in
[Footnote 208: “De antiq. urbis Patavii,” 1560, p. 374.]
[Footnote 209: “De Sculptura,” 1504, gathering f.]
[Footnote 210: Marble, in Sacristy of S. Antonio.]
[Footnote 211: Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 75, 1879.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
PADUA]
[Sidenote: Gattamelata.]
Erasmo Narni, General Gattamelata, died in 1443, and the Venetians, whom he had honourably served, granted the privilege of a site in the tributary town of Padua for the monument, the cost of which was borne by the family of the dead Condottiere. Donatello had to reconstruct the anatomy of a horse on a colossal scale. He was faced by the formidable task of making the first equestrian bronze statue erected in Italy during the Renaissance, and no model existed except the antique statue of Marcus Aurelius at Rome. Donatello was, however, familiar with the four horses on the facade of San Marco at Venice. He undertook to complete the Gattamelata monument by September 1453, but the bulk of the casting was finished as early as 1448, though the chiselling and chasing of the bronze required further work for two or three years. The statue was placed on the pedestal before the agreed date, and a conference was held at Venice to settle the price.[212] There were four assessors on either side, and it was finally agreed that the total payment should be a sum equivalent to about two thousand guineas in our own day. Donatello does not seem to have been hampered by his lack of experience. The work is adroitly handled, the technical difficulty of welding the large pieces of bronze is successfully overcome, and the metal is firm and self-supporting. There are faults, of course, though the fact that the horse ambles need not be considered an error. But the relative proportions of the horse and rider are not quite accurately preserved, Gattamelata being, if anything, rather below the right scale. The monument is, however, so massive and grandiose that criticism seems out of place; indeed, in the presence of the statue one feels that everything is subordinated to the power and mastery of Gattamelata himself. The general is bareheaded, and the strong courageous face is modelled with directness and energy. The gesture is commanding, and he rides easily in the saddle. Colleone’s statue at Venice is superior in many ways: yet the radical distinction between
[Footnote 212: 29, vi. 1453. Donatello is still described as abitante in Padova.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
VENICE]
[Sidenote: Smaller Reliefs and Plaquettes.]
The Gattamelata reliefs seem to be sixteenth-century work. They show a detail of which Donatello and his scholars were fond, namely, the Medusa’s head. It reappears on the Martelli Patera[213] and on the sword-hilt in the Royal Armoury at Turin. The former has been ascribed to Donatello, but the attribution is untenable. It is a bronze medallion of a Satyr and Bacchante, executed with much skill, but not recalling the spirit or handling of Donatello. It is an admirable example of the bronze-work which became popular in Northern Italy, to which Donatello gave the initial impetus, and which soon became ultra-classical in style. The sword-hilt is more interesting, and it is signed “Opus Donatelli Flo.” Some of the detail has a richness which might suggest rather a later date; but the general outline, especially the small crouching putti, was, no doubt, designed by the master. The history of this curious and unusual specimen is unknown, and it is outside Donatello’s sphere of activity. Michael Angelo, it may be remembered, also had the caprice of making a sword for the Aldobrandini family. The manufacture of plaquettes, small bronze plates which were widely used for decorating caskets, inkstands, candlesticks, &c., became a specialised art; and some of these dainty reliefs are possibly made from Donatello’s own designs. There are, however, a few larger bronzes of greater importance in which his personality was able to assert itself more freely than in the reduced plaquettes. But the work of scholars and imitators has been frequently mistaken for Donatello’s own productions. Thus the Ambras (Vienna) relief of the Entombment, with its exaggerated ideas of classical profile, must be the work of a scholar. The Sportello at Venice[214] also shows later Renaissance decoration in its rich arabesques, though two hands seem to have been employed—the four central putti and the two angels being more Donatellesque than the remainder. The relief of the Flagellation in Paris[215] is more important, as we have a rugged and severe treatment both in the subject and its execution: but the summary treatment of such details as the hair makes one doubtful if Donatello can have been wholly responsible. A somewhat analogous Flagellation in Berlin[216] is the work of a clever but halting plagiarist. He has inserted a Donatellesque background of arches showing the lines of stonework, and a pleasant detached girl who reminds us of the figure on the Siena and St. George reliefs. But the imitator’s weak hand is betrayed by the anatomy of the three principal figures. The positions are those of force and energy, but there is no tension or muscular
[Footnote 213: Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 8717, 1863.]
[Footnote 214: Museo Archeologico, Doge’s Palace.]
[Footnote 215: Louvre, “His de la Salle Collection,” No. 385.]
[Footnote 216: Marble, No. 39 B.]
[Footnote 217: Cf. a Donatellesque stucco Madonna beneath a baldachino belonging to Signor Bardini, who also possesses a stucco Entombment similar to the London bronze.]
[Footnote 218: Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 8552, 1863. Bronze.]
[Footnote 219: Stucco No. 41.]
[Footnote 220: See p. 62.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
SIENA CATHEDRAL]
[Illustration: W.A. Mansell
“PAZZI” MADONNA
BERLIN]
[Sidenote: The Madonnas.]
A whole treatise would be required to describe all the Madonnas which have been attributed to Donatello. Within the limits of this volume the discussion must be confined to certain groups which are directly related to him, ignoring a much larger number of subordinate interest. The tendency is to ascribe to Donatello many more than he can possibly have made—varying inversely from the attitude of modern criticism, which has asserted that not twenty paintings by Giorgione have survived. Hundreds of artists must have made these Madonnas, of which only a small minority are in bronze or marble. Many names of sculptors are recorded to whom we can only attribute one or two works; the remainder being generically ascribed to the school of some great man, and often enough to the great man himself. The bulk of these reliefs of the Madonna and Child are in stucco, terra-cotta, carta pesta and gesso—cheap malleable materials which were easily and rapidly worked: the reliefs were manufactured in great numbers for the market. Then again, well-known works were cast, and small differences in colour and finish often gave them the semblance of original work. Vasari says that almost every artist in Florence possessed a cast of Pollaiuolo’s battle-piece.[221] Such facsimiles are eagerly sought after nowadays, and are treated as genuine works of the sculptor. It must also be remembered that during the last decades there has been a systematic multiplication of these reliefs, and that forgeries can be found in most of the great collections of Europe. The first difficulty encountered in trying to discept between Donatello and his school, is that authenticated examples from which to make our inductions are very rare. Donatello certainly made Madonnas in relief: Vasari mentions half a dozen; Neroccio, the Sienese sculptor, possessed una Madonna di gesso di Donatello.[222] There are Madonnas on the tombs of Pope John and Cardinal Brancacci. The latter shows no trace of Donatello’s craft, and the former is of indifferent merit, and was certainly not made by Donatello alone. There are two Madonnas at Padua, one the large altar statue, the other a tiny relief three inches in diameter on one of the bronze Miracle panels. The sources of stylistic data are therefore most scanty. One may say generally that in the authenticated Virgins as well as in the other heads of women, Donatello makes a marked nasal indenture, thus separating him from those later men who drew their heads with the classical profile, showing a straight and continuous line from the forehead down the nose. But even this cannot be pressed too far. As regards the Christ, Donatello seems to preserve the essence and immaturity of childhood. His treatment of the Child is never hieratic, and it is always full of warm human sentiment. The
[Footnote 221: v. 100.]
[Footnote 222: Mentioned in his will. He died in 1500. Milanesi, iii. p. 8.]
[Footnote 223: Marble, No. 39. Versions in soft materials exist in the Louvre, in the Andre and Bardini Collections, and a variant in the Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 7590, 1861.]
[Footnote 224: Marble, Berlin Museum.]
[Footnote 225: Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 7412, 1860; Berlin Museum; collections of Herr von Beckerath and Herr Richard von Kaufmann.]
[Footnote 226: Louvre, Berlin Museum; Verona, in the Viccolo Fogge; cf. also the relief under the archway in the Via de’ Termini, Siena.]
[Footnote 227: Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 57, 1867.]
[Footnote 228: Giovanni Bastianini, 1830-68, though the doyen of forgers, did not profit by his dexterity, and died almost penniless.]
[Footnote 229: Terra-cotta.]
[Footnote 230: Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 8376, 1863.]
[Footnote 231: No. 53 E. Bergamo, Morelli Collection, No. 53.]
[Illustration: Alinari
LOUVRE (NO. 389), PARIS]
The little oval Madonna in London[232] is a work of much interest. It is coloured stucco, and Dr. Bode, who has dated it as early as 1420-30, believes it to be the first example of the Santa conversazione in Italian plastic art. A variant belonging to Dr. Weisbach in Berlin is of equal importance, and both are probably original works and not casts. The Berlin relief is not so thickly painted as the London medallion, and shows signs of the actual modelling. There are contradictions in these valuable works. The music-making angels are like a figure on the Salome relief at Siena: but they are also related to Luca della Robbia’s reliefs on the Campanile, and to a terra-cotta Madonna in London[233] (which reminds one of the Pellegrini Chapel); Matteo Civitale uses a similar type on the tomb of St. Regulus at Lucca; while the crowned saint of the London version was copied at a later date on a well-known plaquette forming the lid of a box of which several examples exist.[234] The figure of the Madonna and Child also suggests another hand; and with the exception of the stone relief in the Louvre, and another derived from it at Padua,[235] it is the only case in which the Virgin is not shown in profile. These latter works are bold and vigorous, and must be ultimately referred to Donatello, the head of the Madonna being rendered by fluent and precise strokes of the chisel. A bronze relief in the Louvre (No. 390), which came from Fontainebleau, has Donatellesque motives; but the spiral coils of hair, and still more the fact that the Virgin’s breasts are hammered into the likeness of putti’s faces—wholly alien to Donatello’s serious ideas—sufficiently prove it to belong to the later Italian school which flourished at the French Court. The Courajod Madonna (Louvre, 389) is modestly called a schoolpiece; but it is a work of first-class importance, for which Donatello is to be credited. This is a very large relief in painted terra, the Madonna being in profile to the left, with a wan and saddened expression. The arm is stiff and wooden, while the undercutting of the profile, like that of the Siena tondo, is so pronounced that, when standing close to the wall on which the relief is fixed, one can see the Virgin’s second eye—unduly prominent and much too near to the nose. This is a needless and distracting mannerism, though, of course, the blemish is only noticeable from one point of view, being quite invisible as one sees the relief from the front, or in a photograph. The Berlin Museum has another large Madonna comparable for its scale and rich colouring to the Courajod relief. This came from the convent of Santa Maria Maddalena
[Footnote 232: Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 93, 1882.]
[Footnote 233: Ibid. No. 7594, 1861.]
[Footnote 234: One was in the Spitzer Collection, another belongs to M. Gustave Dreyfus.]
[Footnote 235: No. 294, Davillier bequest; and in the entrance hall to the Sacristy of the Eremitani at Padua.]
[Footnote 236: Terra-cotta No. 39a.]
[Footnote 237: The others are Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 7624, 1861, marble. Berlin Museum, stucco. Madame Andre, marble, finer than the London version. Marquise Arconati-Visconti, Paris, marble, and a rough uncoloured stucco in the Casa Bardini.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: W.A. Mansell
FROM SANTA MARIA MADDALENA DEI PAZZI, FLORENCE]
[Illustration: Alinari
SAN LORENZO, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: The Pulpits of San Lorenzo.]
Donatello was sixty-seven when he returned from Padua. He seems to have been unsettled during his later years, undertaking ambitious schemes which he did not execute, and hesitating whether Florence or Siena should be the home of his old age. The bronze pulpits of San Lorenzo[238] are the most important works of this period, and they were left unfinished at his death. Donatello was an old man, and the work bears witness to his advancing years. Bandinelli says that the roughness of the modelling was caused by failing eyesight,[239]
[Footnote 238: Properly speaking, they are ambones. They stand in the west end of the nave of the church close to the junction of the transepts.]
[Footnote 239: 7, xii. 1547. “_... Donato non fece mai la piu brutta opera_,” &c. Letter printed in Bottari, i. 70.]
[Footnote 240: It is probable that these famous horses were mere wrecks in the fifteenth century. At any rate, Lafreri’s engraving of 1546 shows one of them without breast or forelegs, the remainder of the horse being nothing but a large pillar of brick. Herr von Kaufmann has an admirable statuette of Donatello’s latter period modelled from the horses on the San Lorenzo frieze. Cf. also Mantegna in the Madonna di San Zeno, Verona.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alinari
SAN LORENZO, FLORENCE]
[Sidenote: Donatello’s Influence on Sculpture.]
The influence of Donatello on his three greatest contemporaries was small. Jacopo della Quercia always retained his own massive style. Luca della Robbia and Ghiberti—the Euphuist of Italian sculpture—were scarcely affected by the sterner principles of Donatello. All four men were, in fact, exponents of distinct and independent ideas, and handed on their traditions to separate groups of successors. Nanni di Banco and Il Rosso were, however, impressed by Donatello’s monumental work, while other sculptors, such as Simone Fiorentino, Vecchietta, Michelozzo, Andrea del Aquila and Buggiano (besides much anonymous talent) were largely influenced by him. It is owing to the fact that Donatello was the most influential man of his day that so many “schoolpieces” exist.[241] The influence on his successors is less easily determined, except so far as concerns the men who worked for him at Padua, together with Riccio, the most skilful bronze caster of his day, who indirectly owed a good deal to Donatello. But Urbano da Cortona and his colleagues produced little original work after their return from Padua: their training seems to have merged their individuality into the dominant style of Donatello; and much of their subsequent work is now ascribed to Donatello or his bottega. Verrocchio, whom Gauricus calls Donatello’s rival, owes little or nothing to the elder man, and the versatile sculptors who outlived Donatello, such as Rossellino, Benedetto da Maiano, Mino da Fiesole and Desiderio, show relatively small traces of his influence. But Donatello’s sculpture acted as a restraining
[Footnote 241: E.g., work wrongly attributed to Donatello: the figure of Plenty in the courtyard of the Canigiani Palace, Florence; the Lavabo in San Lorenzo; the two figures on the famous silver altar at Pistoja; the bronze busts in the Bargello; the font at Pietra Santa; chimney-pieces, gateways, stemme, and numberless Madonnas and small bronzes.]
[Footnote 242: Casa Buonarroti, Florence.]
[Footnote 243: From the Gualandi Collection. It is attributed by some to a Neapolitan sculptor.]
[Footnote 244: “Vita,” 1553, p. 14.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Early Criticism of Donatello.]
Donatello’s activity is the best testimonial to the appreciation of his work during his lifetime. Sabba del Castiglione was proud to possess a specimen of Donatello’s sculpture.[245] Commissions were showered on him in great numbers, and Gauricus says that he produced more than all his contemporaries.[246] Flavius Blondius of Forli compares him favourably with the ancients.[247] Bartolomeo Fazio warmly praised Donatello, his junior.[248] Francesco d’Olanda[249] and Benvenuto Cellini[250] also admired him. Lasca credited Donatello with having done for sculpture what Brunellesco did for architecture:
“E Donatello messe
la scultura
Nel dritto
suo sentier ch’ era smarrita
Cosi l’architettura
Storpiata,
e guasta alle man’ de’ Tedeschi....”
and so forth.[251] Another early poem, the Rappresentazione of King Nebuchadnezzar, shows the great popularity of Donatello in the humbler walks of life.[252] Vasari’s rhetoric led him to say that Donatello was sent by Nature, indignant at seeing herself caricatured.[253] Bocchi claims that, having equalled the ancients and surpassed the sculptors of his own day, Donatello’s name will live in the perpetual memory of mankind.[254]
[Footnote 245: “Ricordi,” 1554, p. 51.]
[Footnote 246: “De Sculptura,” 1504, gathering f. “Donatellus ... aere ligno, marmore laudatissimus, plura hujus unius manu extant opera, quam semel ab eo ad nos caeterorum omnium.”]
[Footnote 247: “Italia Illustrata,” Bale, 1531, p. 305. “Decorat etiam urbem Florentiam ingenio veterum laudibus respondente, Donatello Heracleotae Zeusi aequiparandus, ut vivos, juxta Virgilii verba, ducat de marmore vultus.”]
[Footnote 248: “De Viris illustribus,” Florence ed. 1745, p. 51. “Donatellus ... excellet non aere tantum, sed etiam marmore notissimus, ut vivos vultus ducere, et ad antiquorum gloriam proxime accedere videatur.”]
[Footnote 249: “Dialogues,” Raczynski ed. Paris, 1846, p. 56.]
[Footnote 250: “Due Trattati,” ed. Milanesi, 1857, passim.]
[Footnote 251: “Due Vite di Brunellesco,” p. 142.]
[Footnote 252: Semper, 321.]
[Footnote 253: “Lem.,” iii. 243, in first edition.]
[Footnote 254: 1677 edition.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Character and Personality of Donatello.]
Donatello must be judged by his work alone. His intellect is only reflected in his handicraft. We know little about him, but all we know bears tribute to his high character. The very name by which he was called—Donatello—is a diminutive, a term of endearment. His generosity, his modesty, and a pardonable pride, are recorded in stories which have been generically applied to others, but which were specific to himself. He shared his purse with his friends:[255] he preferred plain clothing to the fine raiment offered by Cosimo de’ Medici;[256] and he indignantly broke the statue for which a Genoese merchant was unwilling to pay a fair price.[257] He was recognised as a man of honourable judgment, and he was called upon to act as assessor several times. The friend of the Medici, of Cyriac of Ancona, of Niccolo Niccoli, the greatest antiquarian of the day, and of Andrea della Robbia, one of the pall-bearers at his funeral, must have been a man of winning personality and considerable learning. But he was always simple and naive: benigno e cortese, according to Vasari,[258] but as Summonte added with deeper insight, his work was far from simple.[259] He is one of the rare men of genius against whom no contemporary attack is recorded. He was content with little;[260] his life was even-tenored; his work, though not faultless, shows a steady and unbroken progress towards the noblest achievements of plastic art.
[Footnote 255: Gauricus, b. 1.]
[Footnote 256: Vespasiano de’ Bisticci, Vite.]
[Footnote 257: “Vasari,” iii. 253.]
[Footnote 258: Ibid. iii. 244.]
[Footnote 259: “Fo in Fiorenza ad tempo de’ nostri padri Donatello huomo raro, semplicissimo in ogni altra cosa excepto che in la scultura.”]
[Footnote 260: Matteo degli Orghani, writing in 1434, says: “Impero che e huomo ch’ ogni picholo pasto e allui assai, e sta contento a ogni cosa.” Guasti, iv. 475. Donatello died in 1466, probably on December 15. He was buried in San Lorenzo at the expense of the Medici. Masaccio painted his portrait in the Carmine, but it is lost. The Louvre panel No. 1272, ascribed to Paolo Ucello, shows the painter, Manetti, Brunellesco, and Donatello. Monuments have been recently erected to the sculptor in his native city. For Donatello’s homes in Florence, see “Misc. Fiorentina,” vol. i. No. 4, 1886, p. 60, and “Miscellanea d’arte,” No. 3, 1903, p. 49.]
WORK LOST OR NOT EXECUTED
Padua.—For the Santo altar, a figure of God the Father, stone; a Deposition and the remaining bas-reliefs mentioned in the “Anonimo Morelliano;” a St. Sebastian, wood; a Madonna in the church of the Servi.
Ferrara.—Donatello probably worked there; in 1451 he visited the town as an assessor. Gualandi, iv. 35.
Modena.—Donatello also visited this town in 1451, and received a first instalment towards the equestrian statue of Borso d’Este. Campori, “Gli artisti Italiani.” Modena, 1855, p. 185.
For Mantua he made a large number of works, including columns, capitals, images of the Madonna in stone and terra-cotta, a St. Andrew in tufo, &c.; also the design for a shrine of St. Anselm. See documents in Archivio Storico Lombardo, 1886, p. 666. At Rome a St. John Baptist, “Una testa” in the Minerva Church, and the portrait of Canon Morosini in Santa Maria Maggiore.
At Siena a Goliath, a silver crucifix, gates for the Cathedral, and a marble statue of San Bernardino.
At Ancona and Orvieto statues of St. John the Baptist.
At Florence the following works are lost: the Dovizia, a figure of Plenty, which stood in the Mercato Vecchio; two bronze heads for the Cantoria; the Colossi for the Cathedral; four large stucco Saints in San Lorenzo; a statue with drapery of gilded lead made with Brunellesco. San Rossore for Ogni Santi; a reliquary of Santa Verdiana (Richa, ii. 231); Albizzi tombs. The Cathedral gates were never made. Bocchi, Cinelli, Vasari, and Borghini mention a large number of smaller works now unidentified; plaquettes, Madonnas, crucifixes, heraldic shields, busts and reliefs.
DOCUMENTS
These are printed as specimens of the original authorities upon which our authentic knowledge of Donatello is based.
Denunzia de’ Beni of 1427, stating Donatello’s home, his substance, his partnership with Michelozzo; referring also to the bronze relief for the Siena Font and the figure of San Rossore. Also a list of the sculptor’s family. (Gaye, i. 120.)
Donato di nicholo di betto, intagliatore, prestanziato nel quartiere di Sco. Spirito, gonfalone nichio, in fior. 1. s. 10 den. 2. Sanza niuna sustanza, eccietto un pocho di maserizie per mio uso edella mia famiglia.
E piu esercito la detta arte insieme e a conpagnia con Michelozzo di bartolomeo, sanza niuna chorpo, salvo flor. 30 in piu ferramenti et masserizie per detta arte.
E di detta conpagnia e bottegha tralgho quella sustanza et in quello modo, che per la scritta della sustanza di Michelozzo sopradetto appare nel quartiere di Sco. Giovanni G. dragho, che dice in lionardo di bartolomeo di gherardo e frategli. Eppiu o avere dall’ operaio di duomo di Siena fior. 180 per chagione duna storia dottone, gli feci piu tempo fa.
Eppiu dal convento e frati dogni santi o avere per chagione duna meza fighura di bronzo di Sco. rossore della quale non sa fatto merchato niuno. Chredo restare avere piu che fior 30.
truovomi con questa famiglia in chasa:
Donato danni 40.
M^a Orsa mia madre 80.
M^a Tita mia sirochia, vedova, sanza dote 45.
Giuliano figliuolo di detta M^a tita atratto 18.
Sto a pigione in una chasa di ghuglielmo adimari, posta ne chorso degli adimari e nel popolo Sco. Cristofano,—paghone fior. 15 l’anno.
The contract for the payment of 1900 florins to Donatello in respect of the Bronze Gates for the Sacristy doors of the Cathedral, a work which was subsequently entrusted to Luca della Robbia. (Semper, p. 284.)
21. ii. 1487. Item commiserunt Nicolao Johannotii de Biliottis et Salito Jacobi de Risalitis duobus ex eorum officio locandi Donato N.B.B. civi Florentino magistro intagli faciendo duas portas de bronzo duabus novis sacristiis cathedralis ecclesie florentine pro pretio in totum flor. 1900 pro eo tempore et cum illis pactis et storiis et modis pro ut eis videbitur fore utilius et honorabilius pro dicta opera et quidquid fecerint circa predictum intelligatur et sit ac si factum foret per totum eorum officium.
Payment for casting the bronze statue of St. Louis for the Paduan altar; also for two of the Miracle reliefs and two symbols of the Evangelists. (Gloria.)
19. vi. 1447. E a di dicto ava M^o Andrea dal Mayo per far getare duy de i miracholli de S. Antonio e dui guagnelista e un S. Luixe. i quali va in lanchona de laltaro grande—lire 45 soldi 12.
Payment to Donatello and some of his assistants (Gloria.)
11. ii. 1447. E a di ii dicto ave Donatello da Fiorenza per so nome de luy e de urbano e de Zuan da Pixa e de Antonio Celino e de Francesco del Vallente su garzon e de Nicolo depentor so desipollo over garzon per parte over sora la anchona over palla el dicto e i dicti de (i.e., devono) fare al altaro grande del curo (i.e., coro) del santo,—lire cento e soldi dexe.
BOOKS OF REFERENCE
Albertini, “Memoriale di molte statues,” 1863 (1st ed., Florence, 1510).
Anonimo Morelliano, “Notizie d’opere di disegno,” written about 1530, 1884 (1st ed. 1800).
Bocchi, F., “Eccellenza della statua di San Giorgio,” Florence, 1584; edited by Cinelli, “Bellezze della citta di Firenze,” 1677 (1st ed. 1592).
Bode, W., “Donatello a Padoue,” Paris, 1883; “Florentiner Bildhauer der Renaissance,” Berlin, 1902.
Boito, Camillo, “L’Altare di Donatello,” Milan, 1897.
Borghini, “Riposo,” Florence, 1730 (1st ed. 1586).
Bottari, G., “Lettere pittoriche,” 8 vols. 1822 (1st ed.).
Cellini, B., “Due Trattati,” edited by Carlo Milanesi, 1857.
Cicognara, “Storia della scultura,” Venice, 1823, 7 vols.
Gauricus, P., “De Sculptura,” Florence, 1504.
Gaye, “Carteggio inedito d’artisti,” Florence, 1839, 3 vols.
Ghiberti, L., “Commentaries” in Vasari, vol. i.
Gloria, Michael Angelo, “Donatello fiorentino
e le sue opere, ... in
Padova,” Padua, 1895.
Gnoli, Article on “Donatello in Rome”; “Arch. storico dell’ arte,” 1888.
Gonzati, “La Chiesa di S. Antonio di Padova,” 1852, 2 vols.
Gualandi, “Memorie,” Bologna, 1840.
Lindsay, Lord, “Christian Art,” 1885, 2 vols.
“L’Osservatore Fiorentino,” 1821, 3 vols. (1st ed. 1797).
Lusini, V., “Il San Giovanni di Siena,” Florence, 1901.
Milanesi, C., “Documenti dell’ arte Senese,” Siena, 1854, 3 vols.
Milanesi, G., “Catalogo delle opere di Donatello,” Florence, 1888.
Molinier, E., “Les Plaquettes,” Paris, 1886, 2 vols.
Muentz E., “Les Precurseurs de la Renaissance,”
Paris, 1882;
“Donatello,” Paris, 1885.
Perkins, C., “Tuscan Sculptors,” 1864, 2 vols.
Reymond, M., “La Sculpture Florentine,” Florence, 1898.
Richa, “Notizie istoriche,” Florence, 1754, 10 vols.
Schmarsow, A., “Donatello,” Breslau, 1886.
Semper, H., “Donatellos Leben und Werke,” Innsbruck, 1887; “Donatello, seine zeit und Schule,” Vienna, 1875.
Semrau, M., “Donatello’s Kanzeln in San Lorenzo,” Breslau, 1891.
Tanfani-Centofanti, “Notizie di Artisti ... Pisani,” Pisa, 1898.
Titi, “Ammaestramento Utile,” Rome, 1686.
Vasari, “Vite dei Pittori,” Florence, Lemonnier, ed. 1846, 14 vols. (1st ed. 1550).
Von Tschudi, “Donatello e la critica moderna,” Turin, 1887.
Abraham: statue, 10, 30
Alberti, L.B.: on Art, 22
Ambras: entombment, 177
Ammanati: sculptor, 102
Amorino: bronze, Bargello, 113, 114
Ancona: Baptist for, 59
Andre (Madame) Collection:
Prophet, 7;
St. John, 57;
profile warrior, 98;
bronze children, 114;
marble boy, 115;
Gonzaga bust, 127;
St. Sebastian, 177
Andrew, St.: statue (lost), 199
Annunciation: Sta. Croce, 49, 113, 154
Anselm, St.: projected shrine, 199
Antonio, St.: at Padua, bronze, 153
Aquila, Andrea del: sculptor, 191
Aragazzi: see Tombs
Architect: Donatello as, 59, 65
Arduino: engineer, 143
Aretino: letter from, 76
Assistants, Donatello’s:
Moscatello, 64, 168;
Giovanni da Pisa, 75, 168, 190, 203;
Nani, G., 167;
Cocaro, N., 168;
Meo of Florence, 168;
Pipo of Florence, 168;
Antonio of Lugano, 168;
Bartolommeo of Ferrara, 168;
Jacomo, goldsmith, 168;
Squarcione, 150;
Giovanni da Becato, 168;
Francesco del Mayo, 168;
Andrea delle Caldiere, 168;
Urbano da Cortona, 168, 169;
Francesco Valente, 168, 203;
Antonio of Pisa, 168;
Bellano, 170, 190;
Bertoldo, 189, 191
Assumption: Brancacci tomb, 80
Assyrian low relief, 81
Athos, Mount: conventionalised art, 22
Aurelius, M.: equestrian statue, 173
Bandinelli, 46, 102, 186
Baptist, St. John: see St. John
Baptistery gates, 2;
competition, 3;
Magdalen, 144;
Coscia tomb, 72
Bardini Collection:
Madonna, 54, 185;
fountain, 66;
tomb slab, 85;
Crucifixion, 178
Bas-relief: its limitations, 137
Bastianini, 182
Battoni, P.: painter, 145
Becchi: shield, 68
Beckerath: Madonna, 182
Bellano, 170, 189, 190
Benda Collection: bust, 118
Benedetto da Maiano, 191
Bentivoglio: medal of, 82
Bergamo: Madonna, 183
Berlin Museum:
bust, terra cotta, 120;
Gonzaga, bronze, 127;
bronze head of old man, 128;
St. John, bronze, 147;
putto, bronze, from Siena, 114;
Flagellation, marble, 178;
David, bronze, 52;
Madonnas, 180
Bernardino, St.: projected statue, 146, 199
Bertoldo, 189, 191
Blondius, F., 193
Bocchi: passim
Bologna: sculpture at, 9, 85, 143
Boni: shield, 68
Boniface VIII.: statues of, 9
Borso d’Este: projected statue, 199
Botticelli, 99
Bramantino: drawings, 90
Brancacci: see Tombs
Bronzino, 52, 102
Brosses, des: criticisms, 138, 144
Brunellesco:
model for gates, 3;
co-operation with Donatello, 37, 200
Buggiano, 191
Busts:
Benda Collection, 118;
Dreyfus Collection, 118;
Duke of Westminster’s Collection,
118;
Hainauer Collection, 119;
Faenza St. John, 119;
Martelli St. John, 118;
San Lorenzo, Florence, 126;
St. Cecilia, London, 126;
Gonzaga bronze, 127;
old man’s head, bronze, 128;
Gattamelata, 99, 129;
Vanchettoni, 118;
Vecchio Barbuto, Florence, 130;
Roman Emperor, Florence, 130;
old woman, bronze, 130;
San Rossore, 130, 201;
Niccolo da Uzzano, 121
Camondo, Comte de: Crucifixion, 178
Canigiani: Palazzo, sculpture, 191
Canon of Art, 20
Cantoria:
San Lorenzo, 64;
Cathedral, 103, 107, 199;
Luca della Robbia’s, 106-8
Capodalista: horse, 175
Castiglione: Sabba del, 119, 193
Cecilia, St. (London), 126;
ditto, Lord Wemyss, 172
Cellini, B., 141, 193
Charge to Peter (London), 95
Chartres Cathedral: statuary, 41
Cherichini, supposed portrait of, 20
Childhood, Donatello’s representation of, 103
Chimaera: Etruscan, 69
Choristers of bronze, Padua, 163
Cinelli: passim
Ciuffagni: sculptor, 60, 66
Civitali, M., sculptor, 13
Classical influences, 4, 90, 103, 104;
architecture, 160
Cocaro, Donatello’s assistant, 168
Colle, Simone da: sculptor, 3
Colleone: equestrian statue, 150
Colossi, 34
Coronation window, 60
Coscia: see Tombs
Cozzarelli: sculptor, 192
Criticism on Donatello, early, 193;
later, 93
Croce, Santa, sculpture in, 49, 113, 38
Crowds: Donatello’s treatment of, 156
Crucifix: Santa Croce, 47, 156
Crucifixion:
Bargello bronze, 178;
Camondo, bronze, 178;
Berlin, 178
Cyriac of Ancona, 194
Daniel: statue, 10 St., at Padua, bronze, 154
Dante, 45, 90
Davanzati: shield, 68
David:
marble statue, 16;
Martelli’s statue, 52;
bronze, 99;
Berlin, 52
Dello: his epitaph, 13
Denunzia, 1, 76, 201
Desiderio, 133, 191
Doni, A.: criticism of Ghiberti, 138
Dovizia: statue, 142, 199
Drapery: Donatello’s treatment of, 31
Drawings by Donatello, 60
Dreyfus Collection:
marble bust, 118;
Christ and St. John, relief, 133;
St. Jerome, bronze, 170;
Madonna bronze, 177;
Verrocchio, putto, 105
Entombment:
Vienna, 177
Padua: marble, 161
Eremitani altar, 169
Evangelist symbols at Padua, 161
Siena, 169
Eve: bas-relief, 142
Faenza:
bust of St. John, 119;
St. Jerome, 148
Faith: statuette at Siena, 71
Fazio, B., 193
Filarete, 91
Flagellation:
London, 62;
Paris, 177;
Berlin, 177
Flaxman’s criticism, 93
Florence:
Cathedral facade, 6, 8, 9;
cupola, 65;
cantoria, 107;
sacristy carving, 115;
window, 60;
colossi, 34;
gates, 200, 202
Font:
Siena, 70, 105, 201;
at Pietra Santa, 191
Fontainebleau: Madonna, 184
Fountains, 66, 70
Francis, St.: at Padua, 153
Fulgosio: monument, Padua, 168
Gattamelata:
bust, 99, 129;
tombs, 171;
equestrian statue, 173
Gauricus, 60, 73, 193
Gems: employment of, 97-99, 129
George, St.:
statue, 39;
relief, 42, 72
Ghiberti:
bronze gates, 3, 137;
relation with Donatello, 190;
classical ideas, 89, 91
Ghiberti, Vettorio: drawings, 63, 74
Ghini: Simone, 88
Giacomone da Faenza: drawings, 155
Gianfigliazzi: shield, 68
Gilbert, Alfred, R.A., 82
Giovanni da Pisa, 75, 168, 190, 203
Giuliano: Donatello’s nephew, 2, 202
Goliath: statue (lost), 199
Gonzaga, Louis of: bust, 127
Gori: criticisms, 93
Gothic Art:
Donatello’s relations with, 5, 42;
survivals of, 91
Gozzoli, Benozzo, 9
Grouping: Donatello’s ideas of, 30, 138, 142, 161
Guidarelli: monument, 171
Hands: Donatello’s treatment of, 31
Henry VII.: tomb of, 136
Heraldic sculpture, 67
Hertford House: reliefs, 110
Hope: statuettes, 71, 75
Horse of Colleone, 174;
Gattamelata, 173;
Capodalista, 174
Horse’s head: Naples, 175
Horses of St. Mark’s, Venice, 173;
of Monte Cavallo, 189
Ilaria del Caretto: tomb, 82
Intarsia, 161
Isotta da Rimini, 163
Jerome, St.: Faenza, 148
John XXIII.: see Tombs, Coscia
St. John Bapt.:
Campanile statue, 18;
Martelli statue, 56;
Bargello statue, 57, 58;
Dilke Collection, 57;
Orvieto, 59, 147;
Ancona, 59;
Rome, 56, 57;
Faenza, 119;
Louvre, 120;
Berlin, bronze, 146;
Berlin, terra-cotta, 120;
Siena, 146;
Venice, 146;
Hainauer Collection, 149
St. John Ev.:
statue, 14;
reliefs, 134
Judith, 140
Justina, St.: at Padua, 154
Kaufmann:
Madonna, 182;
statuette, 189
Lasca, 193
Lavabo, San Lorenzo, 67
Laurana, F.: sculptor, 131
Leopardi, 175
Ligorio: architect, 90
Lille relief, 5, 72, 113
Lions in Florence, 67-9
London collection:
Flagellation, 62;
charge to Peter, 95;
St. Cecilia, 126;
marble relief of woman, 132;
Magdalen, 149;
lamentation over dead Christ, 165;
shrine of St. Justina, 171;
Martelli patera, 176;
Deposition, bronze, 178;
oval Madonna, 184;
bronze boy, 115
Lorenzo, San:
pulpits, 107, 186;
sacristy, 133, 139;
bronze doors, 135;
lavabo, 191;
statues perished, 199
Lorenzetti; early paintings, 145
Louis, St.:
bronze Santa Croce, 38;
bronze at Padua, 155, 202
Louvre collection:
Pot tomb, 79;
bronze by Valadier, 97;
marble Baptist, 120;
drawings, 61;
Madonnas, 181-185;
painting of St. John, 120;
portrait of Donatello, 195;
Flagellation, 177
Lucca, Siege of, 65
Luke, St.: statue, 124
Lytton, Earl of, medallion portrait, 82
Madonnas:
Bardini, 54, 178, 181;
Beckerath, 182;
Berlin, Pazzi, marble, 181;
Orlandini, marble, 181;
S.M.M. dei Pazzi, 185;
Brancacci, 80;
Capella Medici, group, 185;
Courajod, 185;
Dreyfus Desiderio, 81, 177;
delle Treppe, 192;
Eremitani, Paris, 184;
Fontainebleau, 184;
Kaufmann, 182;
London-Weisbach, oval, 184;
Milan, Pierino da Vinci, 81;
Madonna of the Rose, London, 183;
Padua, large bronze, 152;
small relief, 180;
Pietra Piana, 182;
Piot, Louvre, 55, 183;
Quincy Shaw, 81;
Siena Cathedral, 181;
Verona, 182;
Wemyss, Earl of, 81
Magdalen:
Florence baptistery, 144;
London, 149;
Berlin, 149
Malatesta Annalena: bust, 130
Mandorla door:
prophets, 7
profile heads, 34
Manetti:
biographer, 63, 195;
supposed portrait, 11
Mantegna: relation to Donatello, 96, 150, 161, 187
Mark, St.: statue, 37
Martelli, David, 52, 113;
patera, 176;
shield, 68;
St. John, 118
Martin V.: tomb of, 88
Marzocco, 67
Masaccio: paintings by, 161, 164, 195
Mataloni: horse’s head, 175
Medallions in Medici palace, 97
Medallists, 59, 82
Medici:
fountain, 166;
exile, 88, 97;
medallions, 97;
Lorenzo de’, 175
Medici, Capella, 185
Mengs, R.: criticism by, 27, 93
Meo: Donatello’s assistant, 168
Michael Angelo:
Moses, 15;
technique, 53, 101;
San Petronio, 71;
relation to Donatello’s art, 192;
Bacchus, 192
Michelozzo, 39, 43, 48;
partnership with Donatello, 72, 201;
Brancacci tomb, 77;
Aragazzi tomb, 76;
Prato pulpit, 109;
work at Milan, 115;
statues of St. John, 149
Mino da Fiesole, 53, 191
Miracle reliefs at Padua, 156
Mocenigo: tomb, 14, 41
Montepulciano, Pasquino da, 75
Montorsoli, 46
Morosini: medallion, 97, 199
Moses: statue, 15
Nanni di Banco, 30, 190
Naples:
Brancacci tomb, 77;
bronze horse’s head, 175
Narni: see Gattamelata
Neroccio: sculptor, 70, 180, 192
Niccolo da Uzzano: bust, 121
Niccolo Niccoli, 194
Nollekens, 62
Nude: studies from, 101
d’Olanda, Francesco, 193
Orcagna, 6
Orlandini, Madonna, Berlin, 181
Orsa: Donatello’s mother, 2, 202
Or san Michele: niche, 63, 104
Orvieto: Baptist for, 59
Padua in 1443, 149; work for altar, 149-176, 202
Pagno di Lapo, 78, 83
Painter: Donatello as, 59
Parthenon, 25, 105, 122
Pasquino da Montepulciano, 75
Patera Martelli, 176
Pazzi, Madonna, Berlin, 181
Pazzi:
fountain, 66;
shield, 68;
frieze, 135
Pellegrini: chapel, 135, 184
Perseus, by Cellini, 141
Perugino: drawing by, 60
Peruzzi: drawings by, 60
Peter, St.: statue, 36
Petrarch, 90
Piero, Niccolo di; sculptor, 124
Pieta at Padua, bronze, 164
Piot: Madonna, 65
Pisa: Donatello at, 59, 78
Pisano Niccolo, 91
Pistoja: silver altar, 191
Plaquettes, 176
Pocetti, B.: drawing of facade of Duomo, 10
Poggio:
statue, 12;
on Rome, 90
Politics, influence of, 143
Pollaiuolo: his battle-piece, 179
Polychromacy, 121
Portrait of Donatello, 195
Pot tomb, Louvre, 79
Prato pulpit, 109
Procdocimus, St.: at Padua, bronze, 155
Pulpit Prato, 109
San Lorenzo, 186
Quercia: Jacopo della, 3, 70, 53;
his school, 191;
Siena font, 70
Reymond, Marcel: criticism, 108
Reynolds, Sir J.:
on drapery, 31;
on Gothic art, 45
Riccio, 191
Robbia:
Andrea della, 104;
Donatello’s pall bearer, 194
Robbia:
Luca della, 73;
cantoria, 106, 108;
portraits by, 125;
bronze doors, 135, 202;
lunettes, 151
Rome:
Donatello’s first journey to, 4;
statue of St. John at, 57;
Crivelli tomb, 83;
Donatello’s second journey to, 88;
Rome in 1433, 88;
tabernacle in St. Peter’s, 94
Rossellino, 66, 91, 119, 191
Rosso: sculptor, 18, 191
Rossore, San: bust, 130, 201
Sebastian, St.:
bronze, M. Andre, 177
wood (now lost), 199
Sense of distance, 23
light and shade, 29
proportion, 30
nature, 27
Sermoneta: Duca di, 9
Shields:
heraldic, 67;
Martelli, 68
Siena:
cathedral font, 70, 201;
figures from font, 114, 105;
Pecci tomb, 84;
marble Madonna, 181;
St. John Baptist, 146;
statues on facade, 175
Simone: sculptor, 2, 88, 191
Soderini: supposed portrait of, 20
Sogliani, T.: work on Magdalen, 144
Sportello Venice, 177
Siena, 71
Squarcione, 150
Stiacciato, 80
Strabo: on marble, 78
Strozzi Filippo, 91
Strozzi Palla, 150
Summonte, 194
Sword hilt at Turin, 176
Symbols of Evangelists: Padua, 161
Technique: Donatello’s, 53
Tita: Donatello’s sister, 2, 202
Tombs:
Coscia, drawings for, 61;
history of, 72;
Brancacci, 73, 77;
Assumption, 80;
Martin V., 88;
Aragazzi, 73, 76;
Medici Giovanni de’, 72;
Caretto, 82;
Sixtus IV., 82;
Albizzi, 83;
Chellini, 83;
Accaiuoli, 83;
Crivelli, 83;
Pecci, 84;
Scaligers, 86;
Rococo style, 87;
Saltarello, 109;
Fulgosio, 168;
Gattamelata, 171;
Roycelli, 170
Torrigiano, 80, 136
Turin sword hilt, 176
Turini, 70, 192
Uffizzi gallery: drawings, 60
Urbano da Cortona, 191
Uzzano, Niccolo da: bust, 121
Valente: Donatello’s assistant, 168, 203
Vandalism, 8
in Rome, 88
Vasari: passim
Vecchietta: sculptor, 191
Venice: horses of St. Mark’s, 173
statue of St. John, 146
Sportello, 177
Verdiana, St.: reliquary, 200
Verona:
Madonna, 182;
sculpture on cathedral, 124;
sculpture on San Zeno, 124
Verrocchio, 73, 99, 101, 105, 174
Vienna: entombment, 177
Vinci: Leonardo da, 22, 29, 66
Visconti, Marquise A.: Collection, 132, 185
Warfare: Donatello and, 65
Weisbach: Madonna, 184
Wemyss, Earl of, collection:
Madonna, 81;
St. Cecilia, 172;
Walpole eagle, 162
Wood: employment in sculpture, 148
Zuccone: statue, 26, 96
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CURATOR OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF BRITISH ART
With Fifty-two Illustrations
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LIBRARY OF ART
ALL SCHOOLS AND PERIODS will be represented, but only the Greatest Masters will emerge as Biographies. The rest will be treated in relation to their fellows and forerunners as incidents of a development.
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By A.J. FINBERG
MYRON, PHEIDIAS
POLYKLEITOS, SKOPAS, PRAXITELES, AND LYSIPPOS
By ERNEST GARDNER
Professor of Greek Archaeology at University College, London
By Mrs. ARTHUR STRONG (EUGENIE SELLERS), LL.D.
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By PROFESSOR LANGTON DOUGLAS
By B. DE SELINCOURT
By BECKWITH SPENCER
Assistant Professor at the South Kensington School of Art
By LORD BALCARRES [Ready.
By G.F. HILL
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Late Director of the British School at Rome
By CHARLES HOLROYD [Ready.
By C. RICKETTS
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By T. STURGE MOORE
By L. DIMIER [Immediately.