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Then comes Donatello's fall, illustrating the genesis of sin from crime, in accordance with the Biblical story of Cain; and this precipitates an examination, not only of the result upon Donatello himself, but of the degree in which others, even the most guiltless, are involved.
Donatello's pulpit, for which a contract was made in 1425 which named Michelozzo with him as one of those industriosi maestri intent on the work, is built into the south-west corner of the church overlooking the Piazza.
I have dwelt upon this episode, partly because it illustrates the peculiar thirst for glory in the students of that time, but more especially because it casts a thin clear thread of actual light upon the masterpiece which, having been transported with this difficulty from Donatello's workshop, is now to be seen by all lovers of fine art, in part at least, at Montepulciano.
John of the Louvre, and Benedetto da Maiano's: they will soon be poring over the Vita Nuova and Petrarch. Two other St. Johns I am speaking of Donatello's have turned out differently.
Both the cantorie Donatello's, begun in 1433 and finished in 1439, and Luca's, begun in 1431 and finished in 1438 fulfilled their melodious functions in the Duomo until 1688, when they were ruthlessly cleared away to make room for large wooden balconies to be used in connexion with the nuptials of Ferdinand de' Medici and the Princess Violante of Bavaria.
Peter is gradually going to sleep and collapsing in a fashion which is truly ignoble. And the same applies to sculptured figures or to figures standing isolated like statues; no Greek would have ventured upon the swaggering position, with legs apart and elbows out, of Donatello's St. George, or Perugino's St.
It failed in everything in which antique sculpture had succeeded; it accomplished what Antiquity had left undone. Its sense of bodily beauty was rudimentary; its knowledge of the nude alternately insufficient and pedantic; the forms of Donatello's David and of Benedetto's St. John are clumsy, stunted, and inharmonious; even Michelangelo's Bacchus is but a comely lout.
In niches there were some mediaeval busts of Donatello's forgotten ancestry; and among them, it might be, the forlorn visage of that hapless knight between whom and the fountain-nymph had occurred such tender love passages. Throughout all the jovial prosperity of Monte Beni, this one spot within the domestic walls had kept itself silent, stern, and sad.
When they are it is safe to assume that the work they equally admire is truly great that it belongs to the highest order of noble works of art. The main objection to it has been that it is not sufficiently "monumental," and, indeed, it has not the massiveness nor the repose of such a work as Donatello's "Gattamelata," the greatest of all equestrian statues.
Forgetting for a moment the immense spiritual meaning of this noble quartet of romances, and regarding them as works of art in the straiter sense, they are felt to be practically blameless examples of the principle of adapting means to a desired end. After Donatello's deed of death, because what follows is psychologically the most important part of the book, the speed slackens accordingly.
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