Donatello, in whom, curiously enough, the love of nature was limited to its human aspect.  He seems to have been impervious to outdoor nature, to the world of plants and birds and beasts.  Ghiberti, his contemporary, was a profound student of natural life in all its forms, and the famous bronze doors of the Baptistery are peopled with the most fanciful products of his observation.  “I strove to imitate nature to the utmost degree,” he says in his commentary.[25] Thus Ghiberti makes a bunch of grapes, and wanting a second bunch as pendant, he takes care to make it of a different species.  The variety and richness of his fruit and flower decoration are extraordinary and, if possible, even more praiseworthy than the dainty garlands of the Della Robbia.  With Donatello all is different.  He took no pleasure in enriching his sculpture in this way.  The Angel of the Annunciation carries no lily; when in the Tabernacle of St. Peter’s he had to decorate a pilaster he made lilies, but stiff and unreal.  His trees in the landscape backgrounds of the Charge to Peter and the Release of Princess Sabra by St. George are tentative and ill-drawn.  The children of the Cantoria, the great singing gallery made for the Cathedral, are dancing upon a ground strewn with flowers and fruit.  The idea was charming, but in executing it Donatello could only make cut flowers and withered fruit.  There is no life in them, no savour, and the energy of the children seems to have exhausted the humbler form of vitality beneath their feet.  Years afterwards, when Donatello’s assistants were allowed a good deal of latitude, we find an effort to make more use of this invaluable decoration:  the pulpits of San Lorenzo, for instance, have some trees and climbing weeds showing keen study of nature.  But Donatello himself always preferred the architectural background, in contrast to Leonardo da Vinci, who, with all his love of building, seldom if ever used one in the backgrounds of his pictures:  but then Leonardo was the most advanced botanist of his age.

[Footnote 21:  Edition 1768, p. 74.]

[Footnote 22:  E.g., Milanesi, Catalogo, 1887, p. 6.]

[Footnote 23:  Cinelli’s edition, 1677, p. 45.]

[Footnote 24:  Raffaelle Mengs, Collected Works.  London, 1796, I., p. 132.]

[Footnote 25:  Printed in Vasari, Lemonnier Ed., 1846, vol. i.]

* * * * *

[Sidenote:  The Zuccone and the Sense of Light and Shade.]

Speaking of the employment of light and shade as instruments in art, Cicero says:  “Multa vident pictores in umbris et in eminentia, quae nos non videmus.”  One may apply the dictum to the Zuccone where Donatello has carved the head with a rugged boldness, leaving the play of light and shade to complete the portrait.  Davanzati was explicit on the matter,[26] showing that the point of view from which the Zuccone was visible made this coarse treatment imperative, if the