commission to the end of their lives, while younger men, though fully
occupied, were seldom entrusted with comprehensive orders. Even
Michael Angelo was more dependent on the Pope than upon the Church.
Among the earliest commissions given by the Medici after their return
was an order for marble copies of eight antique gems. These were
placed in the courtyard of their Florentine house, now called the
Palazzo Riccardi. They are colossal in size, and represent much labour
and no profit to art. Nothing is more suitably reproduced on a cameo
than a good piece of sculpture; but the engraved gem is the last
source to which sculpture should turn for inspiration. Donatello had
to enlarge what had already been reduced; it was like copying a
corrupt text. The size of these medallions accentuates faults which
were unnoticed in the dainty gem. The intaglio of Diomede and the
Palladium (now in Naples) is too small to show the fault which is so
glaring in the marble relief, where Diomede is in a position which it
is impossible for a human being to maintain. But the relief is
admirably carved: nothing could be better than the straining sinews of
the thigh; and it is of interest as being the only one which is
related to any other work of the sculptor. The head of one of the
angels in the Brancacci Assumption is taken from this Diomede or from
some other version of it. A similar treatment is found in Madame
Andre's relief of a young warrior. It has been pointed out that some
of the gems from which these medallions were made did not come into
the Medici Collections until many years later.[134] Cosimo may have
owned casts of the originals, or Donatello may have copied them in
Rome, for they belonged at this time to the Papal glyptothek, from
which they were subsequently bought. The subjects of these roundels
are Ulysses and Athena, a faun carrying Bacchus, two incidents of
Bacchus and Ariadne, a centaur, Daedalus and Icarus, a prisoner before
his victor, and the Diomede. Gems became very popular and expensive: a
school of engravers grew up who copied, invented, and forged.
Carpaccio introduced them into his pictures,[135] and Botticelli used
them so freely that they almost became the ruling element of
decoration in the "Calumny." Gems are incidentally introduced in
Donatello's bust of the so-called Young Gattamelata, and on Goliath's
helmet below the Bronze David. The Medusa head occurs on the base of
the Judith, on the Turin Sword hilt, an