him than it has to us, the chasing of a bronze was considered no small
part of its quality by the Florentines. Lorenzo Ghiberti's supposed
superiority over his competitors for the doors of San Giovanni was more in
his superb finish than in anything else. The pulpits in San Lorenzo have
something about them that is between the art of Donatello and the art of
Michael Angelo; we may even owe a large part of the composition in some of
the stories to Bertoldo. Donatello must have needed a man of judgment and
ability to carry out the numerous and important commissions that issued
from his workshops in his old age. That Michael Angelo studied the pulpits
of San Lorenzo is proved by the numerous motives he took from them in
after life; the general aspect of the figures strangely suggests the
"terribilita" of his style, and the beginnings of several of his motives
can be traced to them, such as the _Centaurs_, the _Pieta_, and, in the
Sistine ceiling, the _Adam_; the monochrome putti used as Caryatides; the
single putto placed at the springing of two arches; the athletes
supporting garlands, similar in proportion to the cherubs supporting
garlands used for the capitals of columns in the pulpits; two figures for
the spaces over the windows. The man with the clean-shaven and bird-like
face writing in a book and dressed in trousers tied in at the ankles, like
the captive barbarians of Roman art, in one of the semi-circular spaces
round the windows, is very like a man standing behind the Madonna who
supports the dead Christ in the deposition of the pulpit. Perhaps it is a
portrait of old Bertoldo himself. In this panel, too, are horsemen riding
animals similar to the ones Michael Angelo drew in his last fresco, _The
Conversion of Saint Paul_. The composition for the scourging of Christ,
supplied by Michael Angelo to Sebastiano del Piombo for his wall painting
in San Pietro in Montorio, follows the lines of the bas-relief of the same
subject on the pulpit. What is more likely than that Bertoldo should have
educated his great pupil by directing him to the glories of the last work
of his master, Donatello, and that Michael Angelo should have studied them
eagerly, particularly if Bertoldo himself was partly responsible for some
of the panels, and may have been working upon them at this time.(63)

The pulpits of San Lorenzo were the second school of Michael Angelo, and
Bertoldo was his master. No great style ever sprang complete from the