platform of the Palazzo Vecchio, as a warning to tyrants of the fate which awaited them, with the inscription, Exemplum Sal. Pub. Cives posuere 1495.'1

less de

realistic.

Between his extremely naturalistic style, of which the Mag- Works dalen and St. John already described, may be taken as the types, cidedly and that closely approaching to the Antique, there are many works by Donatello, decidedly realistic, but far more pleasing, because less exaggerated. Such are the statue and bust of St. John, in the Martelli Palace, whose charm lies in an extreme refinement and truth, and a delicacy of treatment, combined with great individuality, especially in the bust. The same qualities give value to another bust of St. John, in a room of the parish priest's house, adjoining the Chiesa della Commenda at Faenza, which is singularly refined, as well as simple, true, and natural in expression. In it, as in the profile bust of the same saint (a bas-relief in dark stone at the Uffizi), the hair is wonderfully treated, growing in the most natural way from the head, and falling about it in ringlets perfectly graceful in line, and almost silken in quality. (See Plate XIX.). The ancients were, indeed, unrivalled in their treatment of hair in the abstract, but no sculptor, ancient or modern, ever surpassed Donatello in giving it all its qualities of growth and waywardness.

Other representations of St. John by Donatello are a wooden A.D. 1456. statue in the Florentine chapel of the church of the Frari at Venice, and one of bronze in the Duomo at Siena, neither marked by any salient qualities, and one in wood in the sacristy of St. John Lateran, of which the limbs, and especially the A.D. 1433 hands, are beautifully modelled. We have already frequently referred to the friendship which existed between Cosmo de' Medici

1 Baldinucci, vol. i. p. 405. Gualandi says, that the inscription also refers to the Duke of Athens, who, like Piero de' Medici, suffered expulsion for his abuse of power in 1344. In 1504, the 'Judith' was moved to the Loggia de' Lanzi, to make room for Michel Angelo's 'David' (Gualandi, op. cit. fourth series, p. 103).

-1434.

Copies

from, and

of the

antique.

and our sculptor, of whose counsel the Merchant Prince largely availed himself in selecting works of art for his private collection, and of his skill in restoring those which were mutilated. He also commissioned copies in relief of eight of his finest Gems for the imitations cortile of his palace, and various original works, of which one of the most remarkable is the charming bronze statue of David, now in the Uffizi (see Frontispiece), which, without being an imitation, is a happy example of the way in which the antique may influence without enslaving an original mind. The youthful, undraped hero, his face overshadowed by a shepherd's hat wreathed with ivy, stands with one foot upon the head of his giant enemy, grasping a huge sword in his right hand, and resting his left against his hip. The care bestowed upon the whole work is visible even in the helmet of Goliath, which is adorned with a beautiful Stiacciato relief of children dragging a triumphal car.1 This bronze is in every way superior to the marble David, also in the Uffizi, which seems to us false in conception, awkward in pose, and theatrical in sentiment. In the same gallery may be seen a delicate little relief in bronze of the triumph of Bacchus, who, stretched upon a car, holds a little satyr high above his head, while one Amorino. pushes it from behind, two sit upon the pole, two drag it, and twelve others dance and sing, clashing their cymbals and trailing bunches of grapes. The celebrated bronze Pătĕra from the Martelli collection, now in the Kensington Museum, is a still more absolute, and truly admirable imitation of the antique, so close, indeed, in design as well as in execution, that it has been supposed by some persons to have been copied from an antique gem." The

It is, perhaps, the first nude statue made in Italy since the days of the Empire.

2 This supposition is strengthened by the fact, that Gori, in his account of the engraved gems belonging to the Medici family, mentions two as antique, each of them representing one of the figures in Donatello's Pătěra (H. De Triqueti, Fine Arts Quarterly, May 1864). The Directors of the Kensington Museum bought this work for 6001.