ttermost, it is
not necessary to assume that they were common in classical times;
partly owing to the technical difficulties and expense, and partly
owing to their disinclination to make sculpture interpret profound
impressions, mental or intellectual.

There are only four life-sized statues of women by Donatello: this
Judith, the Magdalen, the St. Justina, and the Madonna at Padua. The
Dovizia is lost, and she was treated as an emblematic personage. These
figures and the statuettes at Siena show that, although not accustomed
to make female statues, Donatello was perfectly competent to do so.
The little Eve, on the back of the Madonna's throne at Padua--the
only nude figure of a woman he ever made, and here only in relief--is
exquisite in sentiment and form. The statue of Judith had an
adventurous life. After the revolution in 1495, the group was removed
from the Medici palace to the Ringhiera of the Palazzo Pubblico, and
the words of warning against tyranny were engraved on its new base:
"_Exemplum salutis publicae cives posuere_, 1495." Judith was the type
of nationalism, the heroine of a war of independence: and this mark of
the Florentine love of liberty has lasted to our own day. No Medici
dared to obliterate the ominous words. Donatello was not much in
politics: his father had taken too violent a share in the feuds of his
day, and narrowly escaped execution. Nor was Donatello's art coloured
by politics: the Florentines did not give commissions like the Sienese
for allegorical representations of the life and duties of citizenship.
Differing from Michael Angelo, Donatello made no Brutus; he did not
concentrate the political tragedies of his day into a Penseroso and a
group of statues full of grave symbolical protests against the
statecraft of his time; and, except for the accidental loss of
Judith's pedestal, Donatello's art never suffered from the curse of
politics. Michael Angelo was always surrounded by the pitfalls of
intrigue and politics: some of his work was sacrificed in consequence.
The colossal statue of Pope Julio was hurled from its place on the
facade of San Petronio, Maestro Arduino the engineer, having covered
the ground where it was to fall with straw and fascines, in order that
no damage should be done--to the pavement! And the broken statue was
sent away to Ferrara, where it was converted into a big cannon, which
they felicitously christened Juliana![177]

[Footnote 177: Gotti, "Vita," i. 66.]