which the jet of water would issue.  These reliefs, much inferior to the bronze capital at Prato, have been over-rated.  As a group the Judith is not really successful.  It is a pile of figures, less telling in some ways than the Abraham and Isaac, though, having no niche, it has to undergo the severer test of criticism from every aspect.  But before Michael Angelo the Italian free-standing group was tentative.  Even in Michael Angelo’s sculpture, when we consider its massive scale, the extent and number of his commissions, and the ease with which he worked his material, it is astonishing how few free-standing groups were made.  His grouping was applied to the relief.  The free group is, of course, the most comprehensive vehicle of intensified emotion or action; it gives an opportunity of doubling or trebling the effect on the spectator.  Sculpture has never realised to the full the chances offered by grouped plastic art of heroic proportions.  Classical groups cannot be fairly judged by the Laocoon, the Farnese Bull, or even the Niobe reliefs.  Their theatrical character is so patent, that it is obvious how far inferior they must be to the work of greater men whose genuine productions have perished.  But, even so, the group being the medium through which emotions could be intensified to the uttermost, it is not necessary to assume that they were common in classical times; partly owing to the technical difficulties and expense, and partly owing to their disinclination to make sculpture interpret profound impressions, mental or intellectual.

There are only four life-sized statues of women by Donatello:  this Judith, the Magdalen, the St. Justina, and the Madonna at Padua.  The Dovizia is lost, and she was treated as an emblematic personage.  These figures and the statuettes at Siena show that, although not accustomed to make female statues, Donatello was perfectly competent to do so.  The little Eve, on the back of the Madonna’s throne at Padua—­the only nude figure of a woman he ever made, and here only in relief—­is exquisite in sentiment and form.  The statue of Judith had an adventurous life.  After the revolution in 1495, the group was removed from the Medici palace to the Ringhiera of the Palazzo Pubblico, and the words of warning against tyranny were engraved on its new base:  “Exemplum salutis publicae cives posuere, 1495.”  Judith was the type of nationalism, the heroine of a war of independence:  and this mark of the Florentine love of liberty has lasted to our own day.  No Medici dared to obliterate the ominous words.  Donatello was not much in politics:  his father had taken too violent a share in the feuds of his day, and narrowly escaped execution.  Nor was Donatello’s art coloured by politics:  the Florentines did not give commissions like the Sienese for allegorical representations of the life and duties of citizenship.  Differing from Michael Angelo, Donatello made no Brutus; he did not concentrate the political tragedies of his day into a Penseroso and