The little room through which one passes to the Michelangelos may well be lingered in.  There is a gravely fine floor-tomb of a nun to the left of the door—­No. 20—­which one would like to see in its proper position instead of upright against the wall; and a stone font in the middle which is very fine.  There is also a beautiful tomb by Giusti da Settignano, and the iron gates are worth attention.

From Michelangelo let us ascend the stairs, past the splendid gates, to Donatello; and here a word about that sculptor, for though we meet him again and again in Florence (yet never often enough) it is in the upper room in the Bargello that he is enthroned.  Of Donatello there is nothing known but good, and good of the most captivating variety.  Not only was he a great creative genius, equally the first modern sculptor and the sanest, but he was himself tall and comely, open-handed, a warm friend, humorous and of vigorous intellect.  A hint of the affection in which he was held is obtained from his name Donatello, which is a pet diminutive of Donato—­his full style being Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi.  Born in 1386, four years before Fra Angelico and nearly a century after Giotto, he was the son of a well-to-do wool-comber who was no stranger to the perils of political energy in these times.  Of Donatello’s youth little is known, but it is almost certain that he helped Ghiberti with his first Baptistery doors, being thirteen when that sculptor began upon them.  At sixteen he was himself enrolled as a sculptor.  It was soon after this that, as I have said in the first chapter, he accompanied his friend Brunelleschi, who was thirteen years his senior, to Rome; and returning alone he began work in Florence in earnest, both for the cathedral and campanile and for Or San Michele.  In 1425 he took into partnership Michelozzo, and became, with him, a protege of Cosimo de’ Medici, with whom both continued on friendly terms for the rest of their lives.  In 1433 he was in Rome again, probably not sorry to be there since Cosimo had been banished and had taken Michelozzo with him.  On the triumphant return of Cosimo in 1434 Donatello’s most prosperous period began; for he was intimate with the most powerful man in Florence, was honoured by him, and was himself at the useful age of forty-four.

Of Donatello as an innovator I have said something above, in considering the Florentine Davids, but he was also the inventor of that low relief in which his school worked, called rilievo stiacciato, of which there are some excellent examples at South Kensington.  In Ghiberti’s high relief, breaking out often into completely detached figures, he was also a master, as we shall see at S. Lorenzo.  But his greatest claim to distinction is his psychological insight allied to perfect mastery of form.  His statues were not only the first really great statues since the Greeks, but are still (always leaving Michelangelo on one side as abnormal) the greatest modern examples judged