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relief.

Stiacciato, which, though scarcely raised above the surface, Stiacciato modulates by almost imperceptible gradations throughout the scale of parts and looks rather as if drawn than chiselled upon the marble. In it Donatello excelled all other sculptors; his great contemporaries the medallists Pisanello, Matteo di Pasta, and Sperandio used it on a small scale with the utmost skill, but never attempted it in heads of life size. For grandeur and breadth this tomb stands alone among Italian works of the kind; the stern marked face of the cardinal, the two mourning genii simply and classically robed, who look like the choristers of a Greek tragedy, and form the most striking and dramatic embodiment of that Pisan type which we have so often had occasion to notice, and the three Caryatides who bear up the weight of funeral pomp, constitute a most striking and affecting 'ensemble.'"

lomeo

A.D. 1427.

Twelve years before his death, Bartolomeo Aragazzi,3 the Bartolearned secretary of Pope Martin V., commissioned Donatello Aragazzi. and Michelozzo to make his monument for the parish church of Montepulciano (his native town) at an expense of twenty-four thousand scudi. Such a use of his money corroborates the general opinion that he was as eminent for his vanity as for his poetry and learning. So indeed thought Lionardo Bruni, who

1 Specimens of excessively flat relief are to be found in Egyptian sculpture of the earliest period known, and also subsequently to the twenty-sixth dynasty, between which the Egyptians discarded it for a species of incised pictures sunk beneath the level of the stone. The Assyrians also excelled in it, as is proved by the wonderful Kouyundjik reliefs in the British Museum; as did the Etruscans, as we see in the reliefs from Chiusi, preserved at Perugia and Paris. In the fifteenth century, its use was revived by Donatello, in the land once inhabited by that ancient people.

2 This monument was commissioned by Cosmo de' Medici, the cardinal's executor. Donatello tells us in a letter (published by Gaye), that he was to be paid 850 florins, including the expense of its transportation from Pisa (where it was made) to Naples.

3 Biografia Universale, vol. v. p. 137.

4 L. Bruni, Epistolæ. The letter in question is addressed to Poggio Bracciolini (Ep. v. vol. ii. lib. vi. p. 45.)

2

His monument.

in commenting upon it remarks, that no one who trusted in his own fame ever thought of erecting a monument to himself. 'What,' he says, 'can be more ignoble than to memorialise by a monument one whose life says nothing? Cyrus ordered his body to be laid in the earth, saying that no more noble material existed for its reception than that which produced flowers, fruits, and precious things; so Cæsar and Alexander, being of a like opinion, took no pains to erect their own monuments.'1 In this same letter Bruni tells us, that while journeying in the district of Arezzo he fell in with the Aragazzi monument on its way to Montepulciano. The heavy load had stuck fast in the mud, from which all the efforts of the panting oxen could not liberate it. In despair one of the drivers (stopping to wipe the sweat from his brow) gave utterance to his feelings by exclaiming that he hoped the gods would damn all poets past and future. Interested as a man of letters to know the cause of his anger, Bruni asked him why he hated poets; to which the countryman replied, that a foolish and puffed-up man, lately deceased at Rome, had ordered that this marble monument should be erected to his memory in his native town, adding that people called him a poet, but that he had never heard him spoken of as such during his lifetime.

All the pains that Aragazzi took, in order that his monument should be a perpetual memorial of him at Montepulciano, were in vain, for when the new church was built, it was taken down, and either from negligence or animosity (as tradition hath it) partially destroyed.2 Many fragments scattered about the church are so extremely fine as to awaken a lively regret at this

Aragazzi was associated with Poggio Bracciolini and Cincio Romano in bringing to light the works of Lactantius, Vitruvius, Priscianus, and many precious Latin and Greek MSS., which, says Filelfo, they liberated from the prisons in which the Germans and French had immured them (Bettinelli, Risorgimento, &c., vol. i. p. 262, note a).

2 Abate Parigi, Notizie della Città di Montepulciano, p. 87, No. 71.

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unfortunate catastrophe. Nothing, for example, in the whole range of Donatello's sculptures surpasses in beauty one of the two bas-reliefs set into the two first pillars of the central nave, which represents the Madonna seated, holding upon her knee the infant Saviour, who smiles tenderly upon the kneeling Aragazzi, while three lovely children cluster about her feet, upon the shoulder of one of whom the Divine infant rests his foot. Four figures, representing members of the Aragazzi family, are grouped around the Madonna's throne, and behind her head are seen two little angels bearing a garland. All Donatello's best characteristics are to be found in this work, which is admirable in composition, masterly in handling of form and treatment of surface, lovely in the winning grace of the children, and in the perfect sweetness and tenderness of the infant Saviour. The second relief, which is scarcely less fine, represents Aragazzi, clad in his robes of office, conversing with an elderly woman whom he holds by one hand, while he gives the other to one of two youths who follow her, accompanied by two monks. In the centre, looking up and reaching to the other figures, appear the three children of the other bas-relief. The effigy of the deceased poet (which lies just to the left of the great doorway of the church) being less flat in its surface planes, and less realistically worked out than is usual with Donatello, may perhaps be by Michelozzo. The remaining fragments of this monument are the base, now a part of the high altar, which is adorned with festoon-bearing children in low relief; two life-size statues, of Fortitude bearing a column, and Faith classically robed, her face full of character but wanting in beauty; and a life-size alto relievo of GOD the Father, with his hand raised in the act of blessing.

by Dona

One other joint work by Donatello and Michelozzo is a bronze Bas-relief bas-relief, representing the feast of Herod, on the Font of the tello at Baptistry at Siena.1 Of all the reliefs about this font it is

1 Commissioned in 1427 for the sum of 720 lire (Milanesi, Doc. vol. ii.

p. 134). This was the relief originally ordered from Jacopo della Fonte. The

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Siena.

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