Donatello, by Lord Balcarres eBook

David Lindsay, 1st Earl of Crawford
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 224 pages of information about Donatello, by Lord Balcarres.

Donatello, by Lord Balcarres eBook

David Lindsay, 1st Earl of Crawford
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 224 pages of information about Donatello, by Lord Balcarres.
London,[211] and the two Gattamelata monuments in the Santo.  These tombs are very simple, consisting of the effigies of the two Condottieri, fully armed, but with bared heads.  Below is a broad stone relief of children holding the scroll between them, as on the Coscia tomb in Florence.  Above is a lunette containing painting, the whole composition being framed by a severe moulding, and surmounted by the family crest and badge.  They are most remarkable.  The two recumbent figures lie calm and peaceful:  they show the ennobling aspect of death, the belief in a further existence.  This sculptor with his sensitive touch makes us realise the migration.  To “make the good end” was, indeed, a product of Christianity:  antiquity was content if a man parted from life “handsomely.”  Greek art can, of course, show no sign of the Christian virtues of death.  Like the Egyptians, their object was to present the dead as still alive, even where the aid of fiction had to be invoked.  To them sleep and death are often indistinguishable; often again one is left in doubt as to which of the figures on a funeral relief represents the departed.  With death the human body, having ceased to be the home of life, ceased also to be a welcome theme of art.  These two Gattamelatas, father and son, have fought the good fight, and in the carved effigy acquire a statuesque repose which is full of dignity and pathos.  The famous warrior of Ravenna, Guido Guidarelli as he is called, though of a later date, is fashioned in the same spirit; showing, moreover, certain peculiarities in the armour which one notices in the tombs at Padua.  The d’Alagni monument in S. Domenico at Naples, and a tomb in the Carmine of Pisa, are similar in respect of sentiment.  So, too, is the shrine of Santa Giustina in London, of which the details as well as the organic treatment leave no doubt as to its authorship, so closely does it resemble the tomb of Giovanni Gattamelata.  It is a work of singular refinement and beauty.  We see the recumbent figure of the saint on the facade of a sarcophagus, at either side of which are little angels made by the same hand and at the same date as those on Giovanni’s tomb.  Santa Giustina is modelled in low-relief; the sculptor seems to draw in the stone, and the drapery is like linen:  not a blanket or counterpane, but some thin clinging material which is moulded to the form below.  In some ways this precious work is analogous to the more famous bas-relief belonging to the Earl of Wemyss, the St. Cecilia which has been ascribed to Donatello.  This wonderful thing is not well known:  it has been seldom exhibited, and the photograph by which it is usually judged is taken from a reproduction moulded a generation ago.  The original, of rather slaty Lavagna stone, has never been photographed, and the cast, many thousands of which exist, entirely fails to show the intangible and diaphanous qualities of the original.  The widespread popularity of the St. Cecilia would (if
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Donatello, by Lord Balcarres from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.