Donatello, with the uncompromising candour of an artist bent on marking character, felt that he was bound to seize the very pith and kernel of his subject.  If a Magdalen were demanded of him, he would not condescend to model a Venus and then place a book and skull upon a rock beside her; nor did he imagine that the bloom and beauty of a laughing Faun were fitting attributes for the preacher of repentance.  It remained for later artists, intoxicated with antique loveliness and corroded with worldly scepticism, to reproduce the outward semblance of Greek deities under the pretence of setting forth the myths of Christianity.  Such compromise had not occurred to Donatello.  The motive of his art was clearly apprehended, his method was sincere; certain phases of profound emotion had to be represented with the physical characteristics proper to them.  The result, ugly and painful as it may sometimes be, was really more concordant with the spirit of Greek method than Lionardo’s “John” or Correggio’s “Magdalen.”  That is to say, it was straightforward and truthful; whereas the strange caprices of the later Renaissance too often betrayed a double mind, disloyal alike to paganism and to Christianity, in their effort to combine divergent forces.  It may still be argued that such conceptions as sorrow for sin and mortification of the flesh, unflinchingly portrayed by haggard gauntness in the saints of Donatello, are unfit for sculpturesque expression.

A more felicitous embodiment of modern feeling was achieved by Donatello in “S.  George” and “David.”  The former is a marble statue placed upon the north wall of Orsammichele; the latter is a bronze, cast for Cosimo de’ Medici, and now exhibited in the Bargello.[89] Without striving to idealise his models, the sculptor has expressed in both the Christian conception of heroism, fearless in the face of danger, and sustained by faith.  The naked beauty of the boy David and the mailed manhood of S. George are raised to a spiritual region by the type of feature and the pose of body selected to interpret their animating impulse.  These are no mere portraits of wrestlers, such, as peopled the groves of Altis at Olympia, no ideals of physical strength translated into brass and marble, like the “Hercules” of Naples or the Vatican.  The one is a Christian soldier ready to engage Apollyon in battle to the death; the other the boy-hero of a marvellous romance.  The body in both is but the shrine of an indwelling soul, the instrument and agent of a faith-directed will; and the crown of their conflict is no wreath of laurel or of parsley.  In other words, the value of S. George and David to the sculptor lay not in their strength and youthful beauty—­though he has endowed them with these excellent gifts—­so much as in their significance for the eternal struggle of the soul with evil.  The same power of expressing Christian sentiment in a form of perfect beauty, transcending the Greek type by profounder suggestion of feeling, is illustrated in the well-known low-relief of an angel’s head in profile, technically one of Donatello’s most masterly productions.[90]