fully occupied, were seldom entrusted with comprehensive orders.  Even Michael Angelo was more dependent on the Pope than upon the Church.  Among the earliest commissions given by the Medici after their return was an order for marble copies of eight antique gems.  These were placed in the courtyard of their Florentine house, now called the Palazzo Riccardi.  They are colossal in size, and represent much labour and no profit to art.  Nothing is more suitably reproduced on a cameo than a good piece of sculpture; but the engraved gem is the last source to which sculpture should turn for inspiration.  Donatello had to enlarge what had already been reduced; it was like copying a corrupt text.  The size of these medallions accentuates faults which were unnoticed in the dainty gem.  The intaglio of Diomede and the Palladium (now in Naples) is too small to show the fault which is so glaring in the marble relief, where Diomede is in a position which it is impossible for a human being to maintain.  But the relief is admirably carved:  nothing could be better than the straining sinews of the thigh; and it is of interest as being the only one which is related to any other work of the sculptor.  The head of one of the angels in the Brancacci Assumption is taken from this Diomede or from some other version of it.  A similar treatment is found in Madame Andre’s relief of a young warrior.  It has been pointed out that some of the gems from which these medallions were made did not come into the Medici Collections until many years later.[134] Cosimo may have owned casts of the originals, or Donatello may have copied them in Rome, for they belonged at this time to the Papal glyptothek, from which they were subsequently bought.  The subjects of these roundels are Ulysses and Athena, a faun carrying Bacchus, two incidents of Bacchus and Ariadne, a centaur, Daedalus and Icarus, a prisoner before his victor, and the Diomede.  Gems became very popular and expensive:  a school of engravers grew up who copied, invented, and forged.  Carpaccio introduced them into his pictures,[135] and Botticelli used them so freely that they almost became the ruling element of decoration in the “Calumny.”  Gems are incidentally introduced in Donatello’s bust of the so-called Young Gattamelata, and on Goliath’s helmet below the Bronze David.  The Medusa head occurs on the base of the Judith, on the Turin Sword hilt, and on the armour of General Gattamelata.  So much of Donatello’s work has perished that it is almost annoying to see how well these Medici medallions are preserved—­the work in which his individuality was allowed little play, and in which he can have taken no pride.

[Footnote 134:  Molinier, “Les Plaquettes,” 1886, p. xxvi.]

[Footnote 135:  Cf. St. Ursula, Accademia, Venice, No. 574.]

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Alinari

THE BRONZE DAVID