The Medici did not remain in exile long, and their return to Florence marks an epoch in the artistic as well as the political history of Tuscany. From this moment the sway of the private collector and patron began. Gradually the great churches and corporations ceased giving orders on the grand scale, for much of the needful decoration was by then completed. By the middle of the century patronage was almost wholly vested in the magnates of commerce and politics: if a chapel were painted or a memorial statue set up, in most cases the artist worked for the donor, and not for the church authorities. The monumental type of sculpture became more rare, bric à brac more common. Well-known men like Donatello received the old kind of commission to the end of their lives, while younger men, though fully occupied, were seldom entrusted with comprehensive orders. Even Michael Angelo was more dependent on the Pope than upon the Church. Among the earliest commissions given by the Medici after their return was an order for marble copies of eight antique gems. These were placed in the courtyard of their Florentine house, now called the Palazzo Riccardi. They are colossal in size, and represent much labour and no profit to art. Nothing is more suitably reproduced on a cameo than a good piece of sculpture; but the engraved gem is the last source to which sculpture should turn for inspiration. Donatello had to enlarge what had already been reduced; it was like copying a corrupt text. The size of these medallions accentuates faults which were unnoticed in the dainty gem. The intaglio of Diomede and the Palladium (now in Naples) is too small to show the fault which is so glaring in the marble relief, where Diomede is in a position which it is impossible for a human being to maintain. But the relief is admirably carved: nothing could be better than the straining sinews of the thigh; and it is of interest as being the only one which is related to any other work of the sculptor. The head of one of the angels in the Brancacci Assumption is taken from this Diomede or from some other version of it. A similar treatment is found in Madame André's relief of a young warrior. It has been pointed out that some of the gems from which these medallions were made did not come into the Medici Collections until many years later.[134] Cosimo may have owned casts of the originals, or Donatello may have copied them in Rome, for they belonged at this time to the Papal glyptothek, from which they were subsequently bought. The subjects of these roundels are Ulysses and Athena, a faun carrying Bacchus, two incidents of Bacchus and Ariadne, a centaur, Dædalus and Icarus, a prisoner before his victor, and the Diomede. Gems became very popular and expensive: a school of engravers grew up who copied, invented, and forged. Carpaccio introduced them into his pictures,[135] and Botticelli used them so freely that they almost became the ruling element of decoration in the "Calumny." Gems are incidentally introduced in Donatello's bust of the so-called Young Gattamelata, and on Goliath's helmet below the Bronze David. The Medusa head occurs on the base of the Judith, on the Turin Sword hilt, and on the armour of General Gattamelata. So much of Donatello's work has perished that it is almost annoying to see how well these Medici medallions are preserved—the work in which his individuality was allowed little play, and in which he can have taken no pride.
Alinari
THE BRONZE DAVID
BARGELLO, FLORENCE
The Bronze David.
According to Vasari, the Bronze David was made for Cosimo before the exile of the Medici, and consequently previous to Donatello's second journey to Rome. It was removed from the courtyard of the palace to the Palazzo Pubblico, where it remained for many years. Doni mentions it as being there in 1549,[136] and soon afterwards it was replaced by Verrocchio's fountain of the Boy squeezing the Dolphin. It is now in the Bargello. The base has been lost. Albertini says it was made of variegated marbles.[137] Vasari says it was a simple column.[138] It has been suggested that the marble pillar now supporting the Judith belonged to the David, but the David is even less fitted to this ill-conceived and pedantic shaft than Judith herself. The David soon acquired popularity; the French envoy, Pierre de Rohan, wanted a copy of it. It was certainly a remarkable innovation, being probably the first free-standing nude statue made in Italy for a thousand years. There had been countless nude figures in relief, but the David was intended to be seen from every side of Cosimo's cortile. There was no experimental stage with Donatello; his success was immediate and indeed conclusive. David is a stripling. He stands over the head of Goliath, a sword in one hand and a stone in the other, wearing his helmet, a sort of sun-hat in bronze which is decorated with a chaplet of leaves; below his feet is a wreath of bay. It is a consistent study in anatomy. The David is perhaps sixteen years old, agile and supple, with a hand which is big relative to the forearm, as nature ordains. The back is bony and rather angular; the torso is brilliantly wrought, with a purity of outline and a morbidezza which made the artists in Vasari's time believe the figure had been moulded from life. One might break the statue into half a dozen pieces, and every fragment would retain its vitality and significance. The limbs are alert and full of young strength, with plenty more held in reserve: it is heroic in all respects except dimension. The face is clear cut, and each feature is rendered with precision. The expression is one of dreamy contemplation as he looks downwards on the spoils and proof of conquest. David hath slain his tens of thousands! Finally the quality of the statue is enhanced by the care with which the bronze has been chiselled. Goliath's helmet, and David's greaves, on which the fleur de lys florencée has been damascened, are decorated with unfailing tact. The embellishment is in itself a pleasure to the eye, but it is prudently contained within its legitimate sphere; for Donatello would not allow the accessory to invade the statue itself, which is the chief fault of the rival David by Verrocchio. Donatello's statue marks an epoch in the study of anatomy. It is a genuine interpretation of a very perfect piece of humanity; but his knowledge compared with that of his successors was empiric. Leonardo's subtle skill was based upon dissection. Michael Angelo likewise studied from the human corpse, distasteful as he found the process. Donatello had no such scientific training: he had no help from the surgeon or the hospital, hence mistakes; his doubt, for instance, about the connection between ribs and pectoral bones was never resolved. But, notwithstanding this lack of technical data, the Bronze David has a distinction which is absent in statues made by far more learned men. Donatello's intuition supplied what one would not willingly exchange for the most exact science of the specialist. The David was an innovation, but the phrase must be guarded. It was only an innovation so far as it was a free-standing study from the nude. Nothing is more misleading than the commonplace that Christianity was opposed to the representation of the nude in its proper place. The early Church, no doubt, underwent a prolonged reaction against all that it might be assumed to connote; one might collect many quotations from patristic literature to this effect. But the very articles of the Christian Creed militated against the ultimate scorn of the human body: the doctrine of the Resurrection alone was enough to give it more sanctity than could be derived from all the polytheism of antiquity. The Baptism of Christ, the descent into Limbo, and the Crucifixion itself, were scenes from which the use of drapery had to be less or more discarded. The porches and frontals of Gothic churches abounded in nude statuary, from scenes in the Garden of Eden down to the Last Judgment. Abuses crept in, of course, and the Faith protested against them. The advancing standard of comfort and, no doubt, a steadily deteriorating climate, diminished the everyday familiarity with undraped limbs. Clothes became numerous and more normal; the artist came to be regarded as the purveyor of what had ceased to be of natural occurrence. He was encouraged by the connoisseur, lay and cleric, who found his literature in antiquity, and then demanded classical forms in his art. The nude was arbitrarily employed: there was no biblical authority for a naked David, and Donatello was therefore among the first to err in this respect. The taste for this kind of thing sprang from humanism, and throve with hellenism, till a counter-reaction came suddenly in the sixteenth century. Michael Angelo was hotly attacked for his excessive study from the nude as prejudicial to morals.[139] Ammanati wrote an abject apology to the Accademia del Disegno for the very frank nudity of his statues.[140] Some of the work of Bandinelli and Bronzino had to be removed. What was a rational and healthy protest has survived in grotesque and ill-fitting drapery made of tin—very negation of propriety. Although needed for biblical imagery, the nude in Italy was always exotic; in Greece it was indigenous. From the time of Homer there had been a worship of physical perfection. The Palæstra, the cultivation of athletics in a nation of soldiers, the religions of the country, with its favourable atmosphere, climate, and stone, all combined to make the nude a normal aspect of human life. But it was not the sole inspiration of their art: in Sparta, where there was most nude there was least art; in Italy, when there was worst art there was most nude.
