ull of life and vigour, and the David is a sturdy
shepherd-boy who might well engage a lion or a bear. In one respect
the Martelli figure is of great importance. It is unfinished--the only
unfinished marble we have of the master, and it gives an insight into
the methods he employed. It is fortunate that we have some means of
understanding how Donatello gained his ends, although this statue does
not show him at his best; indeed it may have been abandoned because it
did not reach his expectations. However, we have nothing else to judge
by. The first criticism suggested by the David is that Donatello
betrays the great effort it cost him. Like the unfinished Faith by
Mino da Fiesole,[59] it is laboured and experimental. They set to work
hoping that later stages would enable them to rectify any error or
miscalculation, but both found they had gone too far. The material
would permit no such thing, and with all their skill one sees that the
blocks of marble did not unfold the statues which lay hidden within.
As hewers of stone, Donatello and Mino cannot compare with Michael
Angelo. Jacopo della Quercia alone had something of his genius of
material. Nobody left more "unfinished" work than Michael Angelo. The
Victory, the bust of Brutus, the Madonna and Child,[60] to mention a
few out of many, show clearly what his system was. In the statue of
Victory we see the three stages of development or completion. The
statue is _in_ the stone, grows out of it. The marble seems to be as
soft as soap, and Michael Angelo simply peels off successive strata,
apparently extracting a statue without the smallest effort. The three
grades are respectively shown in the rough-hewn head of the crouching
figure, then in the head of the triumphant youth above him, finally in
his completed torso. But each stage is finished relatively. Completion
is relative to distance; the Brutus is finished or unfinished
according to our standpoint, physical or aesthetic. Moreover, the
treatment is not partial or piecemeal; the statue was in the marble
from the beginning, and is an entity from its initial stage: in many
ways each stage is equally fine. The paradox of Michael Angelo's
technique is that his _abozzo_ is really a finished study. The Victory
also shows how the deep folds of drapery are bored preparatory to
being carved, in order that the chisel might meet less resistance in
the narrow spaces; this is also the case in the Martelli David. As a
technical adjunc