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Now Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Magnificent, desired to encourage the art of sculpture in Florence; he therefore established a museum of antiquities in his garden near San Marco, and made Bertoldo, the pupil of Donatello and the foreman of his workshop, keeper of the collection, with a special commission to aid and instruct the young men who studied there. Lorenzo requested Domenico Ghirlandaio to select from his pupils those he considered the most promising, and send them to work in the garden. Domenico sent Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Francesco Granacci; possibly he was rather glad to get these talented elements of insubordination out of his workshop. Thus it was that Michael Angelo came under the influence of a pupil and foreman of Donatello. Bertoldo must be considered the instructor of Michael Angelo in his beloved art of sculpture, and the most important influence in shaping his genius. Very little is known of the man upon whom this responsibility was placed, but he appears to have been worthy of it. Vasari tells us that Bertoldo "was old and could not work; that he was none the less an able and highly reputed artist, not only because he had most diligently chased and polished the casts in bronze for the pupils of Donatello his master, but also for the numerous casts in bronze of battle-pieces and other little things, which he had executed of his own; there was no one then in Florence more masterly in such work." We have no important work entirely by Bertoldo, but he must have been a considerable artist or he would not have been appointed to his important post by such a wise man as Lorenzo the Magnificent. His share of the work for the pulpits of San Lorenzo was probably much greater than we are accustomed to think. Vasari’s word rinettato had a much wider meaning to him than it has to us, the chasing of a bronze was considered no small part of its quality by the Florentines. Lorenzo Ghiberti’s supposed superiority over his competitors for the doors of San Giovanni was more in his superb finish than in anything else. The pulpits in San Lorenzo have something about them that is between the art of Donatello and the art of Michael Angelo; we may even owe a large part of the composition in some of the stories to Bertoldo. Donatello must have needed a man of judgment and ability to carry out the numerous and important commissions that issued from his workshops in his old age. That Michael Angelo studied the pulpits of San Lorenzo is proved by the numerous motives he took from them in after life; the general aspect of the figures strangely suggests the "terribilit
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