with his great patron. A
modern monument in the Martelli Chapel, where the beautiful Annunciation
by Lippo Lippi hangs under a crucifix by Cellini, in the left transept,
commemorates him; but he needs no such reminder here, for about us is
his beautiful and unforgetable work: not perhaps the two ambones, which
he only began on his return from Padua when he was sixty-seven years
old, and which were finished by his pupils Bertoldo and Bellano, but the
work in the old sacristy built in 1421 by Brunellesco. How rough is the
modelling in the ambone reliefs, as though really, as Bandinelli has
said, the sight of the old sculptor was failing; and yet, in spite of
age and the intervention of his pupils, how his genius asserts itself in
a certain rhythm and design in these tragic panels, where, under a
frieze of dancing _putti_,--loves or angels I know not,--of bulls and
horses, he has carved the Agony in the Garden, Christ before Pilate, and
again before Caiaphas, the Crucifixion, the Deposition, in the southern
ambone; while in the northern we find the Descent into Hades, where John
Baptist welcomes our Lord, who draws forth Adam, and, as Dante records,
Abel too, and Noah, Moses, Abraham, and David, Isaac and Jacob and his
sons, not without Rachel, _E altri molti, e fecegli beati_, the
Resurrection and the Ascension, the Maries at the Tomb, the Pentecost.
It is another and very different work you come upon in the Cantoria,
which, lovely though it be, seems to be rather for a sermon than for
singing, so cold it is, and yet full enough of his perfect feeling for
construction, for architecture. It has a rhythm of its own, but it is
the rhythm of prose, not of poetry.

The old sacristy, which is full of him--for indeed all the decorative
work seems to be his--is one of the first buildings of the Renaissance,
the beautiful work of Filippo Brunelleschi. Covered by a polygonal dome,
the altar itself stands under another dome, low and small; and
everywhere Donatello has added beauty to beauty, the two friends for
once combining to produce a masterpiece, though not, as it is said,
without certain differences between them. "Donatello undertook to
decorate the sacristy of S. Lorenzo in stucco for Cosimo de' Medici,"
Vasari tells us. "In the angles of the ceiling he executed four
medallions, the ornaments of which were partly painted in perspective,
partly stories of the Evangelists[108] in basso-relievo. In the same
place he made two do