igures have one curious feature in common--a flavour of
the Orient. The St. John is some fakir, some Buddhist saint. Asiatic
as the Baptist was, it is seldom that Italian art gave him so Eastern
a type; but the explanation is simply that Donatello evolved his own
idea of what a self-centred and fasting mystic would resemble, and his
conception happens to coincide with the outcome of similar conditions
actually put into practice elsewhere. The Berlin bronze is St. John as
Baptist, the others show him with the scroll as Precursor. He always
wears the camel's-hair tunic, which ends just below the knee; at Siena
it is thick, like some woolly fleece; it conceals and broadens the
frame, thus suggesting a stoutness which is not warranted by the
size of the leg. The modelling of legs and arms in these statues is
noteworthy. They are thin, according to Donatello's idea of his
subject; and though the thinness takes the natural form of slender
circumference, one sees that the limb with its angular modelling and
its flat surfaces has _become_ thin: the thinness is explained by the
character. The feet of the Siena bronze are exceptionally good; the
wrist and forearm of the Venice figure are admirable. The Siena
Baptist is nearly life-sized, and was made in 1457. He is the least
introspective of the three, a mature strong man, and the oldest of the
many Baptists Donatello made. The Berlin figure is the flushed
eccentric, holding up the cup he used in baptizing. The figure is half
the size of life, and was doubtless one of the numerous statuettes
which crowned fonts. It has been suggested that this bronze, which is
defective in several places, was commissioned for the Cathedral of
Orvieto in 1423.[183] But the type would appear more advanced than the
busts on the Mandorla doorway or the Siena work made about this time.
Moreover, the contract specifies a St. John _cum signo crucis et
demonstratione ecce agnus Dei_. A Baptist was made at the same time
for Ancona, and is now lost. On first seeing the St. John in Venice
one's impression is to laugh. But he is not really a wild man of the
woods--he is simply covered with and made grotesque by thick masses of
oil paint. A close examination of the figure shows that in some places
the paint is over a quarter of an inch thick, and the last coating it
has received is glutinous in quality, and has been laid on with such
freedom that the position and shape of certain features are altered.
But if s