s straightforward and truthful; whereas the strange caprices of
the later Renaissance too often betrayed a double mind, disloyal alike to
paganism and to Christianity, in their effort to combine divergent forces.
It may still be argued that such conceptions as sorrow for sin and
mortification of the flesh, unflinchingly portrayed by haggard gauntness
in the saints of Donatello, are unfit for sculpturesque expression.

A more felicitous embodiment of modern feeling was achieved by Donatello
in "S. George" and "David." The former is a marble statue placed upon the
north wall of Orsammichele; the latter is a bronze, cast for Cosimo de'
Medici, and now exhibited in the Bargello.[89] Without striving to
idealise his models, the sculptor has expressed in both the Christian
conception of heroism, fearless in the face of danger, and sustained by
faith. The naked beauty of the boy David and the mailed manhood of S.
George are raised to a spiritual region by the type of feature and the
pose of body selected to interpret their animating impulse. These are no
mere portraits of wrestlers, such, as peopled the groves of Altis at
Olympia, no ideals of physical strength translated into brass and marble,
like the "Hercules" of Naples or the Vatican. The one is a Christian
soldier ready to engage Apollyon in battle to the death; the other the
boy-hero of a marvellous romance. The body in both is but the shrine of an
indwelling soul, the instrument and agent of a faith-directed will; and
the crown of their conflict is no wreath of laurel or of parsley. In other
words, the value of S. George and David to the sculptor lay not in their
strength and youthful beauty--though he has endowed them with these
excellent gifts--so much as in their significance for the eternal struggle
of the soul with evil. The same power of expressing Christian sentiment in
a form of perfect beauty, transcending the Greek type by profounder
suggestion of feeling, is illustrated in the well-known low-relief of an
angel's head in profile, technically one of Donatello's most masterly
productions.[90]

It is no part of my present purpose to enumerate the many works of
Donatello in marble and bronze; yet some allusion to their number and
variety is necessary in order to show how widely his influence was
diffused through Italy. In the monuments of Pope John XXIII., of Cardinal
Brancacci, and of Bartolommeo Aragazzi, he subordinated his genius to the
treatment of sepulchra