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Miriam watched the heap of mortality while she could count a hundred, which she took pains to do. No stir; not a finger moved! "You have killed him, Donatello! He is quite dead!" said she. "Stone dead! Would I were so, too!" "Did you not mean that he should die?" sternly asked Donatello, still in the glow of that intelligence which passion had developed in him.
The soft contours soothe as well as enrapture the eye: the tenderness of the Madonnas, the gentleness of the Florentine ladies and youths, as Verrocchio and Mino da Fiesole, Donatello, and Pollaiuolo moulded them, calm one where the perfection of Phidias and Praxiteles excites.
Although we are expressly told in Dolce's Dialogo that Titian "painted the Twelve Cæsars, taking them in part from medals, in part from antique marbles," it is perfectly clear that of the exact copying of antiques such as is to be noted, for instance, in those marble medallions by Donatello which adorn the courtyard of the Medici Palace at Florence there can have been no question.
The three marble figures in niches at the base may be by Michelozzo, who worked with Donatello, or possibly by Pagano di Lapo, as the Madonna above the tomb almost certainly is. Coming up once more into the Piazza from that mysterious dim church, dim with the centuries of the history of the city, you come upon two porphyry columns beside the eastern door.
Both my feet were finally off the bottom, and I felt the wonderful sensation of the first cousin to flying. While I floundered there my father looked off towards the gray horizon, and saw the visions of Hilda, Miriam, Kenyon, and Donatello which the world of readers was presently to behold through his eyes.
Among the bronze-founders it is enough to name Ghiberti, Antonio Filarete, Antonio Pollajuolo, Donatello and his pupil Bertoldo, Andrea Riccio, the master of the candelabrum in S. Antonio at Padua, Jacopo Sansovino, the master of the door of the sacristy in S. Mark's at Venice, Alessandro Leopardi, the master of the standard-pedestals of the Piazza of S. Mark's.
Mino, the Raffaelle of sculpture, Maso del Rodario, whose works add a new grace to the church of Como, Donatello even one asks in vain for more than a shadowy outline of their actual days. Something more remains of Luca della Robbia; something more of a history, of outward changes and fortunes, is expressed through his work.
Then they both laughed together, and heard their own laughter returning in the echoes, and laughed again at the response, so that the ancient and solemn grove became full of merriment for these two blithe spirits. A bird happening to sing cheerily, Donatello gave a peculiar call, and the little feathered creature came fluttering about his head, as if it had known him through many summers.
"You are yourself, and I am Donatello," replied he. "Therefore I love you! There needs no other reason." Certainly, there was no better or more explicable reason. It might have been imagined that Donatello's unsophisticated heart would be more readily attracted to a feminine nature of clear simplicity like his own, than to one already turbid with grief or wrong, as Miriam's seemed to be.
It may still be argued that such conceptions as sorrow for sin and mortification of the flesh, unflinchingly portrayed by haggard gauntness in the saints of Donatello, are unfit for sculpturesque expression. A more felicitous embodiment of modern feeling was achieved by Donatello in "S. George" and "David."
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