Perhaps the greatest of these sculptors in marble, whose works, as winsome as wild flowers, are scattered over the Tuscan hills, was Desiderio da Settignano, born in 1428.  He had worked with Donatello in the Pazzi Chapel, and his tabernacle in the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in S. Lorenzo is one of the most charming things left in that museum of Tuscan work.  Of his beautiful tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce I speak elsewhere:  it is worthy of its fellows—­Bernardo Rosellino’s tomb of Leonardo Bruni in the same church, and the tomb of the Cardinal of Portugal by Antonio Rossellino at S. Miniato.  Desiderio has not the energy of Rossellino or the passionate ardour of Verrocchio.  He searches for a quiet beauty full of serenity and delight.  His work in the Bargello is of little account.  The bust of a girl (No. 198 in the fifth room on the top floor) is but doubtfully his:  Vasari speaks only of the bust of Marietta Strozzi, now in Berlin.  He died in 1464, and his work, so rare, so refined and delicate in its beauty, comes to its own in the perfect achievement of Benedetto da Maiano, born in 1442, who made the pulpit of S. Croce, the ciborium of S. Domenico in Siena.  It was for Pietro Mellini that he carved the pulpit of S. Croce, and here in the Bargello we may see the bust he made of his patron.  In his youth he had carved in wood and worked at the intarsia work so characteristic a craft of the fifteenth century; but on bringing some coffers of this work to the King of Hungary, Vasari relates that he found they had fallen to pieces on the voyage, and ever after he preferred to work in marble.  Having acquired a competence, of this work too he seems to have tired, devoting himself to architectural work—­porticos, altars, and such—­buying an estate at last outside the gate of Prato that is towards Florence; dying in 1497.

It is with a prolific master, Mino da Fiesole, the last pupil, according to Vasari, of Desiderio da Settignano, that the delicate and flower-like work of the Tuscan sculptors may be said to pass into a still lovely decadence.  His facile work is found all over Italy.  The three busts of the Bargello are among his earliest and best works—­the Piero de’ Medici, the Giuliano de’ Medici, and the small bust of Rinaldo della Luna.  There, too, are two reliefs from his hand, and some tabernacles which have no great merit.  A relief of the Madonna and Child is a finer achievement in his earlier manner, and in the Duomo of Fiesole there remains a bust of the Bishop, Leonardo Salutati, while in the same chapel, an altar and relief, from his hand, seem to prove that it was only a fatal facility that prevented him from becoming as fine an artist as Benedetto da Maiano.