seems to me to have been Donatello's
intention in the art of sculpture: his figures are like gestures of
life, of the soul, sometimes involuntary and full of weariness,
sometimes altogether joyful, but always the expression of a mood of the
soul which is dumb, that in its agony or delight has in his work
expressed itself by means of the body, so that, though he never carves
the body for its own sake, or for the sake of beauty, he is as faithful
in his study of it for the sake of the truth, as he is in his study of
those moods of the soul which through him seem for the first time to
have found an utterance. His life was full of wanderings; beside the
journey to Rome with Brunellesco he went to Siena to make the tomb in
the Duomo there of Bishop Pecci of Grosseto, and in 1433, when Cosimo
de' Medici went into exile, he was again in Rome, and even in Naples.
Returning to Florence after no long time, in 1444, he went to Padua,
where he worked in S. Antonio and made the equestrian statue that was
the wonder of the world. On his return to Florence, an old man, a
certain decadence may be found in his work, so that his reliefs in S.
Lorenzo are not altogether worthy of him, are perhaps the work of a man
who is losing his sight and is already a little dependent on his
pupils. One of these, Bertoldo di Giovanni, who died in 1491, has left
us a beautiful relief of a battle, now in the Bargello, and later we
catch a glimpse of him in the garden of Lorenzo's villa directing the
studies in art of a number of young people, among whom was the youthful
Michelangelo. But of the real disciples of Donatello, those who, without
necessarily being his pupils, carried his art a step farther, we know
nothing. His influence seems to have died with him. Tuscan art after his
death, and even before that, had already set out on another road than
his.

Something of that expressiveness, that _intimite_, which Pater found so
characteristic of Luca della Robbia, seems to have inspired all the
sculptors of the fifteenth century save Donatello himself. Not vitality
merely, but a wonderful sort of expressiveness--it is the mood of all
their work. It is perhaps in Luca della Robbia and his school that we
first come upon this strange sweetness, which is really a sort of
clairvoyance, as it were, to the passing aspect of the world, of men, of
the summer days that go by so fast, bringing winter behind them. What
the Greeks had striven to attain, that naturaln