“Le bon roi Dagobert
Mettait son culotte a l’envers.”
Therefore he is contrasted with the very dignified Saint Eloy, who was (like the breeches) quite the reverse, declining to lend the monarch two sous, which Dagobert had ascertained were in the holy man’s possession. “The bas-relief below,” continue the critics cited, “is more certainly by the hand of Nanni. It records a miracle of Saint Eloy, who one day, when shoeing a restive horse which was possessed by a demon, and was kicking and plunging, cut off the animal’s leg to fasten the shoe, and having completed his task, made the sign of the cross and restored the severed limb.” I regret to say that this was written without careful reference to the original. It was not the leg of the horse which was severed, nor a limb, but only the hoof at the pastern joint.
There is yet another explanation of this bas-relief, which I have somewhere read, but cannot now recall—more’s the pity, because it is the true one, as I remember, and one accounting for the presence of the female saint who is standing by, evidently invisibly. Perhaps some reader who knows Number Four will send it to me for a next edition.
It is worth noting that there is in Innsbruck, on the left bank of the Inn, a blacksmith’s shop, on the front of which is a very interesting bas-relief of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, representing Saint Peter or Eligius with the horse in a smithy.
There is another statue on the exterior of this church, that of Saint Philip, by the sculptor Nanni de Banco, concerning which and whom I find an anecdote in the Facetie Diverse, a.d. 1636:
“Now, it befell in adorning the church of Or’ San Michele in Florence, that I Consoli d’Arte (Art Directors of Florence) wanting a certain statue, wished to have it executed by Donatello, a most excellent sculptor; but as he asked fifty scudi, which was indeed a very moderate price for such statues as he made, they, thinking it too dear, refused him, and gave it to a sculptor mediocre e mulo—indifferent and mongrel—who had been a pupil of Donatello; nor did they ask him the price, supposing it would be, of course, less. Who, having done his best, asked for the work eighty scudi. Then the Directors in anger explained to him that Donatello, a first-class sculptor, had only asked fifty; but as he refused to abate a single quattrino, saying that he would rather keep the statue, the question was referred to Donatello himself, who at once said they should pay the man seventy scudi. But when they reminded him that he himself had only asked fifty, he very courteously replied, ‘Certainly, and being a master of the art, I should have executed it in less than a month, but that poor fellow, who was hardly fit to be my pupil, has been more than half a year making it.’
“By which shrewd argument he not only reproached them for their meanness and his rival for incapacity, but also vindicated himself as an artist.”
This is the story as popularly known. In it Nanni is called Giovanni, and it is not true that he was an unworthy, inferior sculptor, for he was truly great. There is another legend of Or’ San Michele, which is thus given by Pascarel, who, however, like most writers on Florence, is so extravagantly splendid or “gushing” in his description of everything, that untravelled readers who peruse his pages in good faith must needs believe that in every church and palazzo there is a degree of picturesque magnificence, compared to which the Pandemonium of Milton, or even the Celestial City itself as seen by Saint John, is a mere cheap Dissenting chapel. According to him, Or’ San Michele is by right “a world’s wonder, and a gift so perfect to the whole world, that, passing it, one should need say (or be compelled to pronounce) a prayer for Taddeo’s soul.” Which is like the dentist in Paris, who proclaimed in 1847 that it was—
“Presque une crime
De ne pas crier, ‘Vive Fattet!’”
The legend, as told by this writer, and cited by Hare, is as follows:
“Surely nowhere in the world is the rugged, changeless, mountain force of hewn stone piled against the sky, and the luxuriant, dream-like poetic delicacy of stone carven and shaped into leafage and loveliness, more perfectly blended and made one than where San Michele rises out of the dim, many-coloured, twisting streets, in its mass of ebon darkness and of silvery light.
“The other day, under the walls of it, I stood and looked at its Saint George, where he leans upon his shield, so calm, so young, with his bared head and his quiet eyes.
“‘That is our Donatello’s,’ said a Florentine beside me—a man of the people, who drove a horse for hire in the public ways, and who paused, cracking his whip, to tell this tale to me. ‘Donatello did that, and it killed him. Do you not know? When he had done that Saint George he showed it to his master. And the master said, “It wants one thing only.” Now this saying our Donatello took gravely to heart, chiefly because his master would never explain where the fault lay; and so much did it hurt him, that he fell ill of it, and came nigh to death. Then he called his master to him. “Dear and great one, do tell me before I die,” he said, “what is the one thing my statue lacks?” The master smiled and said: “Only speech.” “Then I die happy,” said our Donatello. And he—died—indeed, that hour.’
“Now I cannot say that the pretty story is true—it is not in the least true; Donatello died when he was eighty-three, in the Street of the Melon, and it was he himself who cried, ‘Speak then—speak!’ to his statue, as it was carried through the city. But whether true or false, this fact is surely true, that it is well—nobly and purely well—with a people when the men amongst it who ply for hire on its public ways think caressingly of a sculptor dead five hundred years ago, and tell such a tale, standing idly in the noonday sun, feeling the beauty and the pathos of it all.”