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Cellini's Perseus will not quite do, I think, after Donatello and Verrocchio; but few bronzes are more famous, and certainly of none has so vivacious and exciting a story been written as Cellini's own, setting forth his disappointments, mortifications, and pride in connexion with this statue.
Certainly one of the loveliest works of the early Renaissance, it is so full of life and gracious movement, so natural and so noble, that everything else in the Cathedral, save the work of Donatello, is forgotten beside it. Madonna enthroned among the Cherubim in her oval mandorla, upheld by four puissant fair angels, turns with a gesture most natural and lovely to St.
The spectators laughed loudly, but yet with a kind of constraint; for the creature's aspect was strangely repulsive and hideous. Miriam felt her arm seized violently by Donatello. She looked at him, and beheld a tigerlike fury gleaming from his wild eyes. "Bid me drown him!" whispered he, shuddering between rage and horrible disgust. "You shall hear his death gurgle in another instant!"
It is significant that the swaggering posture which became such a special feature of his painting, should have originated with Donatello.
"Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!" said she; "my heart consented to what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knots us together, for time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!" They threw one other glance at the heap of death below, to assure themselves that it was there; so like a dream was the whole thing.
Donatello, shrinking from the battlemented wall with a face of horror. "I cling to life in a way which you cannot conceive; it has been so rich, so warm, so sunny! and beyond its verge, nothing but the chilly dark! And then a fall from a precipice is such an awful death!"
She is towards the left of the composition; a man holds her by the hair of her head. The centre figures and the two at the lower corners remind us forcibly of the pulpits of San Lorenzo. Vasari mentions another bas-relief executed at this period, a seated Madonna with the Infant Jesus, in the manner of Donatello; the inferior bas-relief, now in the Casa Buonarroti, is said to be this work.
Behind it glimmered the Donatello figures and the divine Hermes, a glorious shape in the dusk, looking scorn on human decrepitude. All round spread the dim walls of books. The life they had nourished was dropping into the abyss out of ken they remained. Sixty years of effort and slavery to end so a river lost in the sands! Old Meyrick stole in again, and stood looking at the sleeping Squire.
This, we suspect, was what Miriam had thought of, in coming to the thronged piazza; partly this, and partly, as she said, her superstition that the benign statue held good influences in store. But Donatello remained leaning against the balustrade. She dared not glance towards him, to see whether he were pale and agitated, or calm as ice.
He accordingly bestowed upon it the utmost care and consideration, and erected an enclosure around the place that he might not be disturbed until it should be completed. One day, his friend Donatello met him, and asked him, "What kind of work is this of thine, that thou art shutting up so closely?" Paolo replied, "Thou shalt see it some day; let that suffice thee."
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