e quivering produced, for
example, by the sight of white innocence fluttering helpless in a grey
shadow of lust. So long as the Bible remained a god that piquancy was
found in a _Massacre of the Innocents_; in our own time we find it in a
_Faust and Gretchen_, in the Dore Gallery, or in the Royal Academy.
It was a like appreciation of the certain effect of vivid contrasts as
powerful didactic agents (coupled with, or drowning, a something purer
and more devout) which had inspired those most beautiful and distinctive
of all the symbols of Catholicism, the _Adoration of the Kings_, the
Christ-child cycle, and which raised the Holy Child and Maid-Mother to
their place above the mystic tapers and the Cross. Naturally the Old
Testament, that garner of grim tales, proved a sick wine: _David and
Golias_, _Susanna and the Elders_, the _Sacrifice of Isaac_, _Jethro's
Daughter_. But the story of Judith did not come to be painted in Tuscan
sanctuaries until Donatello of Florence had first cast her in bronze at
the prayer of Cosimo _pater patriae_. Her entry was dramatic enough at
least: Dame Fortune may well have sniggered as she spun round the city
on her ball. Cosimo the patriot and his splendid grandson were no sooner
dead and their brood sent flying, than Donatello's _Judith_ was set up
in the Piazza as a fit emblem of rescue from tyranny, with the vigorous
motto, to make assurance double, "EXEMPLVM SALVTIS PVBLICAE CIVES
POSVERE." Savonarola, who knew his Bible, saw here a keener application
of Judith's pious sin. A few years later that same _Judith_ saw him
burn. Thus, as an incarnate cynicism, she will pass; as a work of art
she is admittedly one of her great creator's failures. Her neighbour
_Perseus_ of the Loggia makes this only too plain! For Cellini has
seized the right moment in a deed of horror, and Donatello, with all his
downrightness and grip of the fact, has hit upon the wrong. It is fatal
to freeze a moment of time into an eternity of writing. His _Judith_
will never strike: her arm is palsied where it swings. The Damoclean
sword is a fine incident for poetry; but Holofernes was no Damocles, and
if he had been, it were intolerable to cast his experience in bronze.
Donatello has essayed that thing impossible for sculpture, to arrest a
moment instead of denote a permanent attribute. Art is adjectival, is it
not, O Donatello? Her business is to qualify facts, to say what things
are, not to state them, to affirm that