When making a portrait he would decorate the sitter’s helmet or breastplate with the cameo which actually adorned it.  With one exception, classical art must be sought in his detail, and only in the detail of work upon which the patron’s advice could be suitably offered and accepted.  Donatello may be compared with the great sculptors of antiquity, but not to the extent of calling him their descendant.  Raffaelle Mengs was entitled to regret that the other Raffaelle did not live in the days of Phidias.[125] Flaxman was justified in expressing his opinion that some of Donatello’s work could be placed beside the best productions of ancient Greece without discredit.[126] These obiter dicta do not trespass on the domain of artistic genealogy.  But it is inaccurate to say, for instance, that the St. George is animated by Greek nobility,[127] since in this statue that quality (whether derived from Gothic or Renaissance ideals) cannot possibly have come from a classical source.  Baldinucci is on dangerous ground in speaking of Donatello as “emulando mirabilmente la perfezione degli antichissimi scultori greci"[128]—­the writer’s acquaintance with archaic Greek sculpture may well have been small!  We need not quarrel with Gori for calling Donatello the Florentine Praxiteles; but he is grossly misleading in his statement that Donatello took the greatest pains to copy the art of the ancients.[129] Donatello may be the mediaeval complement of Phidias, but he is not his artistic offspring.

[Footnote 113:  It is a bronze slab, admirably wrought and preserved, in S. Giovanni Laterano.  Were it not for an exuberance of decoration, one might say that Donatello was responsible for it; the main lines certainly harmonise with his work.  Simone Ghini was mistaken by Vasari for Donatello’s somewhat problematical brother Simone.]

[Footnote 114:  See Codex.  Just.  Leg. 2.  Cod. de aedif. privatis.  A similar law at Herculaneum had forbidden people to make more money by breaking up a house than they paid for the house itself, under penalty of being fined double the original outlay.  This shows the extent of speculative destruction.  Reinesius, “Synt.  Inscript.  Antiq.,” 475, No. 2.]

[Footnote 115:  See his Libellus in “Rer.  Gall.  Script.,” xiv. 313.]

[Footnote 116:  Nihil fere recognoscat quod priorem urbem repraesentet, in “De Varietate fortunae urbis Romae.”  Nov.  Thes.  Antiq.  Rom., i. 502.]

[Footnote 117:  “Ricordi,” 1544.  No. 109, p. 51.]

[Footnote 118:  Written about 1450.  “De re aedificatoria.”  Paris ed. 1553, p. 165.]

[Footnote 119:  Cf. Plate 49 in “Le Rovine di Roma.”  “Tempio circolare.”  Written beside it is “Questo sie uno tempio lo quale e Atiuero (i.e., che e presso al Tevere) dove se chauaue li prede antigha mente (i.e., si cavavano le pietre anticamente).”]

[Footnote 120:  Vasari, “Proemio,” i. 212.]