l, are among the finest work
of that age, full of life and the remembrance of it in their strength
and beauty.

It is, however, in the art of a contemporary that the new age came at
last to its own--in the work of Donatello. In his youth he had worked
for the Duomo and for Or San Michele side by side with Nanni di Banco,
who may perhaps pass as his master. Of Donatello's life we know almost
nothing If we seek to learn something of him, it must be in his works of
which so many remain to us. We know, however, that he was the intimate
friend of Brunellesco, and that it was with him he set out for Rome soon
after this great and proud man had withdrawn from the contest with
Ghiberti for the Baptistery gates. Donatello was to visit Rome again in
later life, but on this first journey that he made with Brunellesco for
the purposes of study, he must have become acquainted with what was left
of antiquity in the Eternal City. It was too soon for that enthusiasm
for antiquity, which later overwhelmed Italian art so disastrously, to
have arisen. When Donatello returned about a year later to Florence to
work for the Opera del Duomo, it is not any classic influence we find in
his statues, but rather the study of nature, an extraordinary desire to
express not beauty, scarcely ever that, but character. His work is
strong, and often splendid, full of energy, movement, and conviction,
but save now and then, as in the S. Croce Annunciation, for instance, it
is not content with just beauty.

Of his work for the Duomo and the Campanile, I speak elsewhere; it will
be sufficient here to note the splendour of the St. John the Divine in
the apse of the Duomo, which, as Burckhardt has divined, already
suggests the Moses of Michelangelo. The destruction of the unfinished
facade has perhaps made it more difficult to identify the figures he
carved there, but whether the Poggio of the Duomo, for instance, be Job
or no, seems after all to matter very little, since that statue itself,
be its subject what it may, remains to us.

In his work at Or San Michele, in the St. Peter, in the St. Mark, so
like the St. John the Divine and in the St. George, here in the
Bargello, we see his progress, and there in that last figure we find
just that decision and simplicity which seem to have been his own, with
a certain frankness and beauty of youth which are new in his work.

[Illustration: ST. JOHN THE DIVINE

_By Donatello. Duomo, Florence_

_Alinari_]