Personally I put Michelangelo’s small David first; it is the one in which, apart from its beauty, you can best believe.  His colossal David seems to me one of the most glorious things in the world; but it is not David; not the simple, ruddy shepherd lad of the Bible.  This David could obviously defeat anybody.  Donatello’s more famous David, in the hat, upstairs, is the most charming creature you ever saw, but it had been far better to call him something else.  Both he and Verrocchio’s David, also upstairs, are young tournament nobles rather than shepherd lads who have slung a stone at a Philistine bully.  I see them both—­but particularly perhaps Verrocchio’s—­in the intervals of strife most acceptably holding up a lady’s train, or lying at her feet reading one of Boccaccio’s stories; neither could ever have watched a flock.  Donatello’s second David, behind the more famous one, has more reality; but I would put Michelangelo’s smaller one first.  And what beautiful marble it is—­so rich and warm!

One point which both Donatello’s and Verrocchio’s David emphasizes is the gulf that was fixed between the Biblical and religious conception of the youthful psalmist and that of these sculptors of the Renaissance.  One can, indeed, never think of Donatello as a religious artist.  Serious, yes; but not religious, or at any rate not religious in the too common sense of the word, in the sense of appertaining to a special reverential mood distinguished from ordinary moods of dailiness.  His David, as I have said, is a comely, cultured boy, who belongs to the very flower of chivalry and romance.  Verrocchio’s is akin to him, but he has less radiant mastery.  Donatello’s David might be the young lord; Verrocchio’s, his page.  Here we see the new spirit, the Renaissance, at work, for though religion called it into being and the Church continued to be its patron, it rapidly divided into two halves, and while the painters were bringing all their genius to glorify sacred history, the scholars were endeavouring to humanize it.  In this task they had no such allies as the sculptors, and particularly Donatello, who, always thinking independently and vigorously, was their best friend.  Donatello’s David fought also more powerfully for the modern spirit (had he known it) than ever he could have done in real life with such a large sword in such delicate hands; for by being the first nude statue of a Biblical character, he made simpler the way to all humanists in whatever medium they worked.

Michelangelo was not often tender.  Profoundly sad he could be:  indeed his own head, in bronze, at the Accademia, might stand for melancholy and bitter world-knowledge; but seldom tender; yet the Madonna and Child in the circular bas-relief in this ground-floor room have something very nigh tenderness, and a greatness that none of the other Italian sculptors, however often they attempted this subject, ever reached.  The head of Mary in this relief is, I think, one of the most beautiful things in Florence, none the less so for the charming head-dress which the great austere artist has given her.  The Child is older than is usual in such groups, and differs in another way, for tiring of a reading lesson, He has laid His arm upon the book:  a pretty touch.