[Illustration:  Alinari

ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST

CATHEDRAL, FLORENCE]

[Sidenote:  St. John the Evangelist and the marble David.]

The third great statue made for the facade by Donatello is now placed in a dark apsidal chapel, where the light is so bad that the figure is often invisible.  This is the statue of St. John the Evangelist, and is much earlier than Poggio, having been ordered on December 12, 1408.  Two evangelists were to be placed on either side of the central door.  Nanni di Banco was to make St. Luke, Niccolo d’Arezzo St. Mark, and it was intended that the fourth figure should be entrusted to the most successful of the three sculptors; but in the following year the Domopera changed their plan, giving the commission for St. Matthew to Bernardo Ciuffagni, a sculptor somewhat older than Donatello.  Ciuffagni was not unpopular as an artist, for he received plenty of work in various parts of Italy; but he was a man of mediocre talent, neither archaic nor progressive, making occasional failures and exercising little influence for good or ill upon those with whom he came in contact.  He has, however, one valued merit, that of being a man about whom we have a good deal of documentary information.  Donatello worked on the St. John for nearly seven years, and, according to custom, was under obligation to complete the work within a specified time.  Penalty clauses used to be enforced in those days.  Jacopo della Quercia ran the danger of imprisonment for neglecting the commands of Siena.  Torrigiano having escaped from England was recalled by the help of Ricasoli, the Florentine resident in London, and was fortunate to avoid punishment.  Donatello finished his statue in time, and received his final instalment in 1415, the year in which the figures were set up beside the great Porch.  This evangelist, begun when Donatello was twenty-two and completed before his thirtieth year, challenges comparison with one worthy rival, the Moses of Michael Angelo.  The Moses was the outcome of many years of intermittent labour, and was created by the help of all the advances made by sculpture during a century of progress.  Yet in one respect only can Michael Angelo claim supremacy.  Hitherto Donatello had made nothing but standing figures.  The St. John sits; he is almost inert, and does not seem to await the divine message.  But how superb it is, this majestic calm and solemnity; how Donatello triumphs over the lack of giving tension to what is quiescent!  The Penseroso also sits and meditates, but every muscle of the reposing limbs is alert.  So, too, in the Moses, with all its exaggeration and melodrama, with its aspect of frigid sensationalism, which led Thackeray to say he would not like to be left alone in the room with it, we find every motionless limb imbued with vitality and the essentials of movement.  The Moses undoubtedly springs from the St. John, transcending it as Beethoven surpassed Haydn.  In spite of nearly unpardonable faults verging on decadence, it is the greater though the less pleasing creation of the two.  The St. John surveys the world; the Moses speaks with God.