he base of the tomb,
Antonio has carved all sorts of strange and beautiful things--a skull
among the flowers over a garland harnessed to two unicorns; angels too,
youthful and strong, lifting the funeral vases. At Naples, again, he
carved the altar of the Cappella Piccolomini in S. Maria at Montoliveto.
Here in the Bargello some fragments of beautiful things have been
gathered--a tabernacle with two adoring angels, a little St. John made
in 1477 for the Opera, a relief of the Adoration of the Shepherds,
another of Madonna in an almond-shaped glory of cherubim, and, last of
all, the splendid busts of Matteo Palmieri and Francesco Sassetti; but
his masterpiece in pure sculpture is the S. Sebastian in the Collegiata
at Empoli, a fair and youthful figure without the affectation and
languor that were so soon to fall upon him.

Perhaps the greatest of these sculptors in marble, whose works, as
winsome as wild flowers, are scattered over the Tuscan hills, was
Desiderio da Settignano, born in 1428. He had worked with Donatello in
the Pazzi Chapel, and his tabernacle in the chapel of the Blessed
Sacrament in S. Lorenzo is one of the most charming things left in that
museum of Tuscan work. Of his beautiful tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S.
Croce I speak elsewhere: it is worthy of its fellows--Bernardo
Rosellino's tomb of Leonardo Bruni in the same church, and the tomb of
the Cardinal of Portugal by Antonio Rossellino at S. Miniato. Desiderio
has not the energy of Rossellino or the passionate ardour of Verrocchio.
He searches for a quiet beauty full of serenity and delight. His work in
the Bargello is of little account. The bust of a girl (No. 198 in the
fifth room on the top floor) is but doubtfully his: Vasari speaks only
of the bust of Marietta Strozzi, now in Berlin. He died in 1464, and his
work, so rare, so refined and delicate in its beauty, comes to its own
in the perfect achievement of Benedetto da Maiano, born in 1442, who
made the pulpit of S. Croce, the ciborium of S. Domenico in Siena. It
was for Pietro Mellini that he carved the pulpit of S. Croce, and here
in the Bargello we may see the bust he made of his patron. In his youth
he had carved in wood and worked at the intarsia work so characteristic
a craft of the fifteenth century; but on bringing some coffers of this
work to the King of Hungary, Vasari relates that he found they had
fallen to pieces on the voyage, and ever after he preferred to work in
marble. Having a