in the ambone reliefs, as though really, as Bandinelli has said, the sight of the old sculptor was failing; and yet, in spite of age and the intervention of his pupils, how his genius asserts itself in a certain rhythm and design in these tragic panels, where, under a frieze of dancing putti,—­loves or angels I know not,—­of bulls and horses, he has carved the Agony in the Garden, Christ before Pilate, and again before Caiaphas, the Crucifixion, the Deposition, in the southern ambone; while in the northern we find the Descent into Hades, where John Baptist welcomes our Lord, who draws forth Adam, and, as Dante records, Abel too, and Noah, Moses, Abraham, and David, Isaac and Jacob and his sons, not without Rachel, E altri molti, e fecegli beati, the Resurrection and the Ascension, the Maries at the Tomb, the Pentecost.  It is another and very different work you come upon in the Cantoria, which, lovely though it be, seems to be rather for a sermon than for singing, so cold it is, and yet full enough of his perfect feeling for construction, for architecture.  It has a rhythm of its own, but it is the rhythm of prose, not of poetry.

The old sacristy, which is full of him—­for indeed all the decorative work seems to be his—­is one of the first buildings of the Renaissance, the beautiful work of Filippo Brunelleschi.  Covered by a polygonal dome, the altar itself stands under another dome, low and small; and everywhere Donatello has added beauty to beauty, the two friends for once combining to produce a masterpiece, though not, as it is said, without certain differences between them.  “Donatello undertook to decorate the sacristy of S. Lorenzo in stucco for Cosimo de’ Medici,” Vasari tells us.  “In the angles of the ceiling he executed four medallions, the ornaments of which were partly painted in perspective, partly stories of the Evangelists[108] in basso-relievo.  In the same place he made two doors of bronze in basso-relievo of most exquisite workmanship:  on these doors he represented the apostles, martyrs, and confessors, and above these are two shallow niches, in one of which are S. Lorenzo and S. Stefano; in the other, S. Cosimo and S. Damiano.”  The sacristy, according to Vasari, was the first work proceeded with in the church.  Cosimo took so much pleasure in it that he was almost always himself present, and such was his eagerness, that while Brunellesco built the sacristy, he made Donatello prepare the ornaments in stucco, “with the stone decorations of the small doors and the doors of bronze.”  And it is in these bronze doors that, as it seems to me, you have Donato at his best, full of energy and life, yet never allowing himself for a moment to forget that he was a sculptor, that his material was bronze and had many and various beauties of its own, which it was his business to express.  There are two doors, one on each side of the altar, and these doors are made in two parts, and each part is divided into five panels.  With