they were diverted from its
thorough investigation by the manifold other problems of painting as
distinguished from sculpture, and by the vagueness, the unconsciousness
of great creative activity: the antique became one of the influences
in their development, helping very quietly to enlarge and refine their
work.

It was different with Domenico, in whom the man of science was much more
powerful than the artist. His nature required definite decisions and
distinct formulas. It took him some time to understand that the school
of Donatello differed absolutely from the antique, but the difference
once felt, it appeared to him with extraordinary clearness.

He never put his thoughts into words, and probably never admitted even
to himself that the works he had most admired were lacking in beauty;
he merely asserted that the statues of the old Romans and Greeks were
astonishingly beautiful. In reality, however, he was perpetually
comparing the two, and always to the disadvantage of the moderns. It is
possible in our day to judge justly the comparative merits of antique
sculpture and of that of the early Renaissance; or rather to appreciate
them as two separate sorts of art, delightful in quite different ways,
letting ourselves be charmed not more by the actual beauty of form,
and nobility of movement of the one than by the simplicity, the very
homeliness, the essentially human quality of the other. To us there
is something delightful in the very fact that the Davids of Donatello
and Verrocchio are mere ordinary striplings from the street and the
workshop, that the singers of Luca della Robbia are simple unfledged
choir-boys, and the Virgins of Mino Florentine fine ladies; we have
enough of antique perfection, we have had too much of pseudo-antique
faultlessness, and we feel refreshed by this unconsciousness of beauty
and ugliness. A contemporary could not enter into such feelings, he
could not enjoy his own and his fellows' _naivete_; besides, the antique
was only just becoming manifest, and therefore triumphant. To Domenico,
Donatello's David became more and more unsatisfactory, faulty above the
waist, positively ungainly below, weak and lubberly; how could so divine
an artist have been satisfied with that flat back, those narrow shoulders
and thick thighs? He felt freer to dislike the work of Verrocchio, his
own teacher, and a man without Donatello's overwhelming genius; that
David of his, with his immense head and wizen fac