had been credited in his own day with the reputation of being a master of proportion and grouping.  Donatello, however, never really excelled in the free standing group.  His idea was a suite or series of figures against a background, a bas-relief.  The essential quality of a group is that there should be something to unite the figures.  We find this in the Abraham, but the four martyrs by Nanni di Banco are standing close together as if by chance, and cannot properly be called a group in anything but juxtaposition of figures.  Il Rosso helped to make Abraham.  The commission was given jointly to the two sculptors in March 1421, and the statue was finished, with unusual expedition, by November of the same year.  The hand of Rosso cannot be easily detected except in the drapery, which differs a good deal from Donatello’s.  The latter must have been chiefly responsible for the grouping and wholly so for the fine head of Abraham.

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[Sidenote:  Drapery and Hands.]

Rosso’s drapery was apt to be treated in rather a small way with a number of little folds.  Donatello, on the other hand, often tended to the opposite extreme, and in the Campanile figures we see the clothes hanging about the prophets in such ample lines that the Zuccone and Jeremiah are overweighted with togas which look like heavy blankets.  Habbakuk and the Baptist are much more skilfully draped, deference being shown to the anatomy.  “To make drapery merely natural,” said Sir Joshua Reynolds, “is a mechanical operation to which neither genius nor taste are required:  whereas it requires the nicest judgment to dispose the drapery so that the folds have an easy communication, and gracefully follow each other with such natural negligence as to look like the effect of chance, and at the same time show the figure under it to the utmost advantage."[27] The sculptors of the fifteenth century did not find it so easy to make drapery look purely natural, and we are often confronted by cases where they failed in this respect.  It arose partly from a belief that drapery was nothing more than an accessory, partly also from their ignorance of what was so fully realised by the Greeks, that there can be very little grace in a draped figure unless there are the elements of beauty below.  Another comment suggested by Donatello’s early work in marble is that he was not quite certain how to model or dispose the hands.  They are often unduly big; Michael Angelo started with the same mistake:  witness his David and the Madonna on the Stairs.  It was a mistake soon rectified in either case.  But till late in life Donatello never quite succeeded in giving nerve or occupation to his hands.  St. Mark, St. Peter, and St. John all have a book in their left hands, but none of them hold the book; it has no weight, the hand shows no grip and has no sense of possession.  Neither did Donatello always know where to put the hands, giving them the shy and