[Footnote 136:  “_... una colonna nel mezzo dove e un Davitte di Donatello dignissimo._” Letter to Alberto Lollio, 17. viii. 1549, Bottari, iii. 341.]

[Footnote 137:  Giu abasso e Davit di bronzo sopra la colonna fine di marmo variegato. “Memoriale.”]

[Footnote 138:  “Life of Bandinelli,” x. 301.]

[Footnote 139:  “Due dialogi di Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano,” 1564; a tiresome and discursive tirade.]

[Footnote 140:  22. viii. 1582.  Reprinted in Bottari, ii. 529.]

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Alinari

CANTORIA

IN OPERA DEL DUOMO, FLORENCE]

[Sidenote:  Donatello and Childhood.]

Michael Angelo strove to attain the universal form.  His world was peopled with Titans, and he realised his ambition of portraying generic humanity:  not, indeed, by making conventional, but by eliminating everything that was not typical.  The earliest plastic art took clay and moulded the human form; the next achievement was to make specific man—­the portrait; lastly, to achieve what was universal—­the type.  The progress was from man, to man in particular, and ultimately to man in general.  There was a final stage when the typical lost its type without reverting to the specific, to the portrait.  The successors of Michael Angelo were among the most skilful craftsmen who ever existed; but their knowledge only bore the fruit of unreality.  Donatello did not achieve the typical except in his children:  it was only in children that Michael Angelo failed.  He missed this supreme opportunity; those on the roof of the Sistine Chapel are solemn and grown old with care:  children without childhood.  With Donatello all is different.  His greatness and title to fame largely rest upon his typical childhood:  his sculpture bears eloquent witness to the closest observation of all its varying and changeful moods.  Others have excelled in this or that interpretation of child-life:  Greuze with his sentimentalism, the Dutch painters with their stolidity.  In Velasquez every child is the scion of some Royal House, in Murillo they are all beggars.  They are too often stupid in Michelozzo:  in Andrea della Robbia they are always sweet and winsome; Pigalle’s children know too much.  Donatello alone grasped the whole psychology.  He watched the coming generation, and foresaw all that it might portend:  tragedy and comedy, labour and sorrow, work and play—­plenty of play; and every problem of life is reflected and made younger by his chisel.  How far the sculptors of the fifteenth century employed classical ideas is not easily determined.  There was, however, one classical form which was widely used, namely, the flying putti holding a wreath or coat-of-arms between them:  we find it on the frieze of the St. Louis niche, and it is repeated on Judith’s dress.  The wreath or garland, of which the Greeks