atello and Childhood.]

Michael Angelo strove to attain the universal form. His world was
peopled with Titans, and he realised his ambition of portraying
generic humanity: not, indeed, by making conventional, but by
eliminating everything that was not typical. The earliest plastic art
took clay and moulded the human form; the next achievement was to make
specific man--the portrait; lastly, to achieve what was universal--the
type. The progress was from man, to man in particular, and ultimately
to man in general. There was a final stage when the typical lost its
type without reverting to the specific, to the portrait. The
successors of Michael Angelo were among the most skilful craftsmen who
ever existed; but their knowledge only bore the fruit of unreality.
Donatello did not achieve the typical except in his children: it was
only in children that Michael Angelo failed. He missed this supreme
opportunity; those on the roof of the Sistine Chapel are solemn and
grown old with care: children without childhood. With Donatello all is
different. His greatness and title to fame largely rest upon his
typical childhood: his sculpture bears eloquent witness to the closest
observation of all its varying and changeful moods. Others have
excelled in this or that interpretation of child-life: Greuze with his
sentimentalism, the Dutch painters with their stolidity. In Velasquez
every child is the scion of some Royal House, in Murillo they are all
beggars. They are too often stupid in Michelozzo: in Andrea della
Robbia they are always sweet and winsome; Pigalle's children know too
much. Donatello alone grasped the whole psychology. He watched the
coming generation, and foresaw all that it might portend: tragedy and
comedy, labour and sorrow, work and play--plenty of play; and every
problem of life is reflected and made younger by his chisel. How far
the sculptors of the fifteenth century employed classical ideas is not
easily determined. There was, however, one classical form which was
widely used, namely, the flying _putti_ holding a wreath or
coat-of-arms between them: we find it on the frieze of the St. Louis
niche, and it is repeated on Judith's dress. The wreath or garland, of
which the Greeks were so fond, became a favourite motive for the
Renaissance mantelpiece. The classical _amoretti_, of which many
versions in bronze existed, were also frequently copied. But there was
one radical difference between the children of antiquity an