ors of bronze in basso-relievo of most exquisite
workmanship: on these doors he represented the apostles, martyrs, and
confessors, and above these are two shallow niches, in one of which are
S. Lorenzo and S. Stefano; in the other, S. Cosimo and S. Damiano." The
sacristy, according to Vasari, was the first work proceeded with in the
church. Cosimo took so much pleasure in it that he was almost always
himself present, and such was his eagerness, that while Brunellesco
built the sacristy, he made Donatello prepare the ornaments in stucco,
"with the stone decorations of the small doors and the doors of bronze."
And it is in these bronze doors that, as it seems to me, you have Donato
at his best, full of energy and life, yet never allowing himself for a
moment to forget that he was a sculptor, that his material was bronze
and had many and various beauties of its own, which it was his business
to express. There are two doors, one on each side of the altar, and
these doors are made in two parts, and each part is divided into five
panels. With a loyalty and apprehension of the fitness of things really
beyond praise, Donatello has here tried to do nothing that was outside
the realm of sculpture. It was not for him to make the Gates of
Paradise, but the gates of a sacristy in S. Lorenzo. His work is in
direct descent from the work of the earliest Italian sculptors, a
legitimate and very beautiful development of their work within the
confines of an art which was certainly sufficient to itself. Consider,
then, the naturalism of that figure who opens his book on his knees so
suddenly and with such energy; or again, the exquisite reluctance of him
who in the topmost panel turns away from the preaching of the apostle.
Certainly here you have work that is simple, sincere, full of life and
energy, and is beautiful just because it is perfectly fitting and
without affectation.[109] In one of the two small rooms which are on
each side of the sacristy, having the altar between them, Brunellesco by
Cosimo's orders made a well. Here, Vasari tells us later, Donato placed
a marble lavatory, on which Andrea Verrocchio also worked; but the
Lavabo we find there to-day seems very doubtfully Donatello's.

In the centre of the sacristy itself, Vasari tells us, Cosimo caused the
tomb of his father Giovanni to be made beneath a broad slab of marble,
supported by four columns; and in the same place he made a sepulchre for
his family, wherein he separate