a loyalty and apprehension of the fitness of things really beyond praise, Donatello has here tried to do nothing that was outside the realm of sculpture.  It was not for him to make the Gates of Paradise, but the gates of a sacristy in S. Lorenzo.  His work is in direct descent from the work of the earliest Italian sculptors, a legitimate and very beautiful development of their work within the confines of an art which was certainly sufficient to itself.  Consider, then, the naturalism of that figure who opens his book on his knees so suddenly and with such energy; or again, the exquisite reluctance of him who in the topmost panel turns away from the preaching of the apostle.  Certainly here you have work that is simple, sincere, full of life and energy, and is beautiful just because it is perfectly fitting and without affectation.[109] In one of the two small rooms which are on each side of the sacristy, having the altar between them, Brunellesco by Cosimo’s orders made a well.  Here, Vasari tells us later, Donato placed a marble lavatory, on which Andrea Verrocchio also worked; but the Lavabo we find there to-day seems very doubtfully Donatello’s.

In the centre of the sacristy itself, Vasari tells us, Cosimo caused the tomb of his father Giovanni to be made beneath a broad slab of marble, supported by four columns; and in the same place he made a sepulchre for his family, wherein he separated the tombs of the men from those of the women.  But again this work too seems, in spite of Vasari, to belong rather uncertainly to Donatello.  It is very rare to find a detached tomb in Italy, and rarer still to find it under a table, where it is very difficult to see it properly, and the care and beauty that have been spent upon it might seem to be wasted.  It is perhaps rather Buggiano’s hand than Donato’s we see even in so beautiful a thing as this, which Donatello may well have designed.  The beautiful bust of S. Lorenzo over the doorway is, however, the authentic work of Donato himself.  Full of eagerness, S. Lorenzo looks up as though to answer some request, and to grant it.

The splendid porphyry sarcophagus set in bronze before a bronze screen of great beauty, by Verocchio, is certainly one of the finest things here.  Every leaf and curl of the foliage seem instinct with some splendid life, seem to tremble almost with the fierceness of their vitality.  There lie Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, the uncle and father of Lorenzo il Magnifico.  Close by you may see a relief of Cosimo Vecchio, their father.

The cloisters, where Lorenzo walked often enough, are beautiful, and then from them one passes so easily into the Laurentian Library, founded by Cosimo Vecchio, and treasured and added to by Piero and Lorenzo il Magnifico, but scattered and partly destroyed by the vandalism and futile stupidity of Savonarola and his puritans in 1494.  Savonarola, however, was a cleverer demagogue than our Oliver (it is well to remember that he was a Dominican), for he persuaded