at war, and who did not always understand each other’s dialects.  Dante said the number of variations was countless.[45] Alberti, who lived north of the Apennines during his boyhood, took lessons in Tuscan before returning to Florence.  The word Forestiere, now meaning foreigner, was applied in those days to people living outside the province, sometimes even to those living outside the town.  Thus we have a record of the cost of making a provisional altar to display Donatello’s work at Padua—­“per demonstrar el desegno ai forestieri."[46] No final definition of Gothic art, of the maniera tedesca is possible.  Some of its component parts have been enumerated:  rigidity, grotesque, naturalism, and so forth; but the definition is incomplete, cataloguing the effects without analysing their cause.  Whether Donatello was influenced by the ultimate cause or not, he certainly assimilated some of the effects.  The most obvious example of the Gothic feeling which permeated this child of the Renaissance, is his naturalistic portrait-statues.  Donatello found the form, some passing face or figure in the street, and rapidly impressed it with his ideal.  Raffaelle found his ideal, and waited for the bodily form wherewith to clothe it.  “In the absence of good judges and handsome women”—­that is to say, models, he paused, as he said in one of his letters to Castiglione.  One feels instinctively that with his Gothic bias Donatello would not have minded.  He did not ask for applause, and at the period of St. George classical ideas had not introduced the professional artist’s model.  Life was still adequate, and the only model was the subject in hand.  The increasing discovery of classical statuary and learning made the later sculptors distrust their own interpretation of the bodily form, which varied from the primitive examples.  Thus they lost conviction, believing the ideal of the classicals to surpass the real of their own day.  The result was Bandinelli and Montorsoli, whose world was inhabited by pompous fictions.  They neither attained the high character of the great classical artists nor the single-minded purpose of Donatello.  Their ideal was based on the unrealities of the Baroque.

[Footnote 40:  “Melanges d’Histoire,” p. 248.]

[Footnote 41:  Introduction, i. 122.]

[Footnote 42:  “Vita de’ Architetti,” 53.]

[Footnote 43:  Ibid. 151.]

[Footnote 44:  “Discourses,” 1778, p. 237.]

[Footnote 45:  “Qua propter si primas et secundarias et subsecundarias vulgaris Ytalie variationes calculare velimus, in hoc minimo mundi angulo, non solum ad millenam loquele variationem venire contigerit, sed etiam at magis ultra.”—­De Vulg.  Eloq.  Lib., I., cap. x. sec. 8.]

[Footnote 46:  23, iv. 1448.]

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[Illustration:  Alinari

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