sm of the Middle Age, seems to look back with
longing to the antique world, which it would fain claim as its brother,
and after a little moment in the sun falls again into a sort of
mysticism, a new kingdom of the spirit with Michelangelo, and of the
senses merely with Sansovino and Giovanni da Bologna.

Really Tuscan in its birth, the art of the Quattrocento became at last
almost wholly Florentine, a flower of the Val d'Arno or of the hills
about it, where even to-day at Settignano, at Fiesole, at Majano, at
Rovezzano, you may see the sculptors at work in an open bottega by the
roadside, the rough-hewn marble standing here and there in many sizes
and shapes, the chips and fragments strewing the highway.

In the twilight of this new dawn of the love of nature, perhaps the
first figure we may descry is Piero di Giovanni Tedesco (1386-1402), who
carved the second south door of the Duomo about 1398, where amid so many
lovely natural things, the fig leaf and the oak leaf and the vine, you
may see the lion and the ox, the dog and the snail, and man too; little
fantastic children peeping out from the foliage, or blowing through
musical reeds, or playing with a kitten, tiny naked creatures full of
life and gladness.

The second door north of the Duomo was carved by Niccolo di Piero
d'Arezzo, who was still working more than forty years after Tedesco's
death; but his best work, for we pass by his Statue of St. Mark in the
chapel of the apex of the Duomo, is the little Annunciation over the
niche of the St. Matthew of Or San Michele. In his work on the gate of
the Duomo, however, he was assisted by his pupil Nanni di Banco, who,
born in the fourteenth century, died in 1420; and in his work, and in
that of Jacopo della Quercia, a Sienese, and a much greater man, we see
the very dawn itself.

Nanni di Banco, Vasari tells us, was a man who "inherited a competent
patrimony, and one by no means of inferior condition." He goes on to say
that Nanni was the pupil of Donatello, and though in any technical sense
that seems to be untrue, it may well be that he sought Donato's advice
whenever he could, for he seems to have practised his art for love of
it, and may well have recognised the genius of Donatello, who probably
worked beside him. He too worked at Or San Michele, where he carved the
St. Philip, the delightful relief under the St. George of Donatello, the
Four Saints, which seem to us so full of the remembrance of antiquity,
and