's grace of Donatello's St. John of
the Louvre, and Benedetto da Maiano's: they will soon be poring over
the _Vita Nuova_ and Petrarch. Two other St. Johns--I am speaking of
Donatello's--have turned out differently. One, the first beard still
doubtful round his mouth, has already rushed madly away from earthly
loves; his limbs are utterly wasted by fasting; except his legs, which
have become incredibly muscular from continual walking; he has begun
to be troubled by voices in the wilderness--whether of angels or of
demons--and he flies along, his eyes fixed on his scroll, and with them
fixing his mind on unearthly things; he will very likely go mad, this
tempted saint of twenty-one. Here he is again, beard and hair matted,
almost a wild man of the woods, but with the gravity and self-possession
of a preacher; he has come out of the wilderness, overcome all temptations,
his fanaticism is now militant and conquering. This is certainly not
the same man, but perhaps one of his listeners, this old King David of
Donatello--a man at no time intelligent, whose dome-shaped head has
taken back, with the thin white floss hair that recalls infancy, an
infantine lack of solidity; whose mouth is drooping already, perhaps
after a first experience of paralysis, and his eyes getting vague in
look; but who, in this intellectual and physical decay, seems to have
become only the more full of gentleness and sweetness; misnamed David, a
Job become reconciled to his fate by becoming indifferent to himself, an
Ancient Mariner who has seen the water-snakes and blessed them and been
filled with blessing.

These are all statues or busts intended for a given niche or bracket, a
given portico or window, but in a measure free sculpture. Let us now
look at what is already decoration. Donatello's Annunciation, the big
coarse relief in friable grey stone (incapable of a sharp line), picked
out with delicate gilding; no fluttering or fainting, the angel and the
Virgin grave, decorous, like the neighbouring pilasters. Again, his
organ-loft of flat relief, with granulated groundwork: the flattened
groups of dancing children making, with deep, wide shadows beneath their
upraised, linked arms, a sort of human trellis-work of black and white.
Mino's Madonna at Fiesole: the relief turned and cut so as to look out
of the chapel into the church, so that the Virgin's head, receiving the
light like a glory on the pure, polished forehead, casts a nimbus of
shadow r