med; the St. George
in the niche is alert and watchful: in the bas-relief he manfully
slays the dragon. The head is bare and the throat uncovered; the face
is full of confidence and the pride of generous strength, but with no
vanity or self-consciousness. Fearless simplicity is his chief
attribute, though in itself simplicity is no title to greatness: with
Donatello, Sophocles and Dante would be excluded from any category of
greatness based on simplicity alone. St. George has that earnest and
outspoken simplicity with which the mediaeval world invested its
heroes; he springs from the chivalry of the early days of Christian
martyrdom, the greatest period of Christian faith. Greek art had no
crusader or knight-errant, and had to be content with Harmodius and
Aristogeiton. Even the Perseus legend, which in so many ways reminds
one of St. George, was far less appreciated as an incident by
classical art than by the Renaissance; and even then not until patron
and artist were growing tired of St. George. M. Reymond has pointed
out the relation of Donatello's statue to its superb analogue, St.
Theodore of Chartres Cathedral. "_C'est le souvenir de tout un monde
qui disparait._"[36] Physically it may be so. The age of chivalry may
be passed in so far that the prancing steed and captive Princess
belong to remote times which may never recur. But St. George and St.
Theodore were not merely born of legend and fairy tale; their spirit
may survive in conditions which, although less romantic and
picturesque, may still preserve intact the essential qualities of the
soldier-saint of primitive times. The influence of the St. George upon
contemporary art seems to have been small. The Mocenigo tomb, which
has already been mentioned, has a figure on the sarcophagus obviously
copied from the St. George; and elsewhere in this extremely curious
example of plagiarism we find other figures suggested by Donatello's
statues. The little figure in the Palazzo Pubblico at Pistoja is
again an early bit of piracy. In the courtyard of the Palazzo
Quaratesi in Florence, built by Brunellesco between 1425 and 1430, an
early version of the head of St. George was placed in one of the
circular panels above the pillars. It is without intrinsic importance,
being probably a cast, but it shows how early the statue was
appreciated. A more important cast is that of the bas-relief now in
London, which has a special interest from having been taken before the
original