nlikely that an Italian artist, inspired by
the French style, returned from France to work in Florence, as that
Michelozzo was born with a knowledge of the northern manner which he
never practised. An explanation, however, offers itself in the fact that
the Religious Orders, those internationalists, continually passed from
North to South, from East to West, from monastery to monastery, and that
they may well have brought with them certain statues in ivory of Madonna
or the Saints, in which such an one as Donatello could have found the
hint he needed. That such statues were known in Italy is proved not only
by their presence in this museum, but by the ivory Madonna of Giovanni
Pisano in the sacristy of the Duomo at Pisa.

The Marzocco which stood of old on the Ringhiera before the Palazzo
Vecchio might seem to be a work of this period, for it is only saved by
a kind of good fortune from failure. It is without energy and without
life, but in its monumental weight and a certain splendour of design it
impresses us with a sort of majesty as no merely naturalistic study of a
lion could do. If we compare it for a moment with the heraldic shield in
Casa Martelli, where Donato has carved in relief a winged griffin
rampant, cruel and savage, with all the beauty and vigour of Verrocchio,
we shall understand something of his failure in the Marzocco, and
something, too, of his success. In that heavy grotesque and fantastic
Lion of the Bargello some suggestion of the monumental art of Egypt
seems to have been divined for a moment, but without understanding.

In the Casa Martelli, too, you may find a statue of St. John Baptist, a
figure fine and youthful and melancholy, with the vague thoughts of
youth, really the elder brother as it were of the child of the Bargello,
who bears his cross like a delicate plaything, unaware of his destiny.
That figure, so full of mystery, seems to have haunted Donatello all his
life, and then St. John Baptist was the patron of Florence and presided
over every Baptistery in Italy; yet it is always with a particular
melancholy that Donatello deals with him, as though in his vague destiny
he had found as it were a vision. The child of the Bargello passes into
the boy of the Casa Martelli, that lad who maybe has heard a voice sweet
enough as yet while wandering by chance on the mountains, sandalled and
clad in camel's hair. We see him again as the chivalrous youth of the
Campanile, the dedicated, absorbed w