That Ghiberti was not a great sculptor of statues is proved by his work at Orsammichele.  He was no architect, as we know from his incompetence to do more than impede Brunelleschi in the building of the dome.  He came into the world to create a new and inimitable style of hybrid beauty in those gates of Paradise.  His susceptibility to the first influences of the classical revival deserves notice here, since it shows to what an extent a devotee of Greek art in the fifteenth century could worship the relics of antiquity without passing over into imitation.  When the “Hermaphrodite” was discovered in the vineyard of S. Celso, Ghiberti’s admiration found vent in exclamations like the following:  “No tongue could describe the learning and art displayed in it, or do justice to its masterly style.”  Another antique, found near Florence, must, he conjectures, have been hidden out of harm’s way by “some gentle spirit in the early days of Christianity.”  “The touch only,” he adds, “can discover its beauties, which escape the sense of sight in any light."[86] It would be impossible to express a reverential love of ancient art more tenderly than is done in these sentences.  So intense was Ghiberti’s passion for the Greeks, that he rejected Christian chronology and reckoned by Olympiads—­a system that has thrown obscurity over his otherwise precious notes of Tuscan artists.  In spite of this devotion, he never appears to have set himself consciously to reproduce the style of Greek sculpture, or to have set forth Hellenic ideas.  He remained unaffectedly natural, and in a true sense Christian.  The paganism of the Renaissance is a phrase with no more meaning for him than for that still more delicate Florentine spirit, Luca della Robbia; and if his works are classical, they are so only in Goethe’s sense, when he pronounced, “the point is for a work to be thoroughly good, and then it is sure to be classical.”

One great advantage of the early days of the Renaissance over the latter was this, that pseudo-paganism and pedantry had not as yet distorted the judgment or misdirected the aims of artists.  Contact with the antique world served only to stimulate original endeavour, by leading the student back to the fountain of all excellence in nature, and by exhibiting types of perfection in technical processes.  To ape the sculptors of Antinous, or to bring to life again the gods who died with Pan, was not yet longed for.  Of the impunity with which a sculptor in that period could submit his genius to the service and the study of ancient art without sacrificing individuality, Donatello furnishes a still more illustrious example than Ghiberti.  Early in his youth Donatello journeyed with Brunelleschi to Rome, in order to acquaint himself with the monuments then extant.  How thoroughly he comprehended the classic spirit is proved by the bronze patera wrought for his patron Ruberto Martelli, and by the frieze of the triumphant Bacchus.[87] Yet the great achievements of his genius were Christian in their sentiment and realistic in their style.  The bronze “Magdalen” of the Florentine Baptistery and the bronze “Baptist” of the Duomo at Siena[88] are executed with an unrelenting materialism, not alien indeed to the sincerity of classic art, but divergent from antique tradition, inasmuch as the ideas of repentant and prophetic asceticism had no place in Greek mythology.