s
of Gothic churches abounded in nude statuary, from scenes in the
Garden of Eden down to the Last Judgment. Abuses crept in, of course,
and the Faith protested against them. The advancing standard of
comfort and, no doubt, a steadily deteriorating climate, diminished
the everyday familiarity with undraped limbs. Clothes became numerous
and more normal; the artist came to be regarded as the purveyor of
what had ceased to be of natural occurrence. He was encouraged by the
connoisseur, lay and cleric, who found his literature in antiquity,
and then demanded classical forms in his art. The nude was arbitrarily
employed: there was no biblical authority for a naked David, and
Donatello was therefore among the first to err in this respect. The
taste for this kind of thing sprang from humanism, and throve with
hellenism, till a counter-reaction came suddenly in the sixteenth
century. Michael Angelo was hotly attacked for his excessive study
from the nude as prejudicial to morals.[139] Ammanati wrote an abject
apology to the Accademia del Disegno for the very frank nudity of his
statues.[140] Some of the work of Bandinelli and Bronzino had to be
removed. What was a rational and healthy protest has survived in
grotesque and ill-fitting drapery made of tin--very negation of
propriety. Although needed for biblical imagery, the nude in Italy was
always exotic; in Greece it was indigenous. From the time of Homer
there had been a worship of physical perfection. The Palaestra, the
cultivation of athletics in a nation of soldiers, the religions of the
country, with its favourable atmosphere, climate, and stone, all
combined to make the nude a normal aspect of human life. But it was
not the sole inspiration of their art: in Sparta, where there was most
nude there was least art; in Italy, when there was worst art there was
most nude.

[Footnote 136: "_... una colonna nel mezzo dove e un Davitte di
Donatello dignissimo._" Letter to Alberto Lollio, 17. viii. 1549,
Bottari, iii. 341.]

[Footnote 137: _Giu abasso e Davit di bronzo sopra la colonna fine di
marmo variegato._ "Memoriale."]

[Footnote 138: "Life of Bandinelli," x. 301.]

[Footnote 139: "Due dialogi di Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano,"
1564; a tiresome and discursive tirade.]

[Footnote 140: 22. viii. 1582. Reprinted in Bottari, ii. 529.]

* * * * *

[Illustration: _Alinari_

CANTORIA

IN OPERA DEL DUOMO, FLORENCE]

[Sidenote: Don