anderer of the Bargello, the
haggard, emaciated prophet of the Friars' Church at Venice, and at last
as the despairing and ancient seer of Siena, a voice that is only a
voice weary of itself, crying unheeded in the wilderness. And, as it
seems to me in all these figures, which in themselves have so little
beauty, it is rather a mood of the soul that Donatello has set himself
to express than any delight. He has turned away from physical beauty, in
which man can no longer believe, using the body refined almost to the
delicacy and transparency of a shell, in which the soul may shine, or at
least be seen, in all its moods of happiness or terror. That weary
figure who, unconscious of his cross, unconscious of the world, absorbed
in his own destiny, in the scroll of his fate, trudges through the
wilderness without a thought of the way, is as far from the ideal
abstract beauty of the Greeks as from the romantic splendour of Gothic
art. Only with him the soul has lost touch with particular things, even
as the beauty of the Greeks was purged of all the accidents and feeling
that belonged alone to the individual. Like a ghost he passes by, intent
on some immortal sorrow; he is like a shadow on a day of sun, a dark
cloud over the moon, the wind in the desert. And in a moment, we knew
not why, our hearts are restless suddenly, we know not why, we are
unhappy, we know not why, we desire to be where we are not, or only to
forget.

So in the bronze David now in the Bargello we seem to see youth itself
dreaming after the first victory of all the conquests to come, while a
smile of half-conscious delight, is passing from the lips; tyranny is
dead. It is the first nude statue of the Renaissance made for Cosimo de'
Medici before his exile. For Cosimo, too, the Amorino was made that
study of pure delight, where we find all the joy of the children of the
Cantoria, but without their unction and seriousness. And then in the
portrait busts the young Gattemalata, and the terra-cotta of Niccolo da
Uzzano, we may see Donatello's devotion to mere truthfulness without an
afterthought, as though for him Truth were beauty in its loyalty, at any
rate, to the impression of a moment that for the artist is eternity.

His marvellous equestrian statue of Gattemalata is in Padua, his tomb
and reliefs and statues lie in many an Italian city, but here in the
Bargello we have enough of his work to enable us to divine something at
least of his secret. And this