Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second EditionHutton, Edward
History
Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second Edition
Hutton, Edward
Art -- Italy -- Florence; Genoa (Italy) -- History; Tuscany (Italy) -- Description and travel
Only with him the soul has lost touch with particular things, even
as the beauty of the Greeks was purged of all the accidents and feeling
that belonged alone to the individual. Like a ghost he passes by, intent
on some immortal sorrow; he is like a shadow on a day of sun, a dark
cloud over the moon, the wind in the desert. And in a moment, we knew
not why, our hearts are restless suddenly, we know not why, we are
unhappy, we know not why, we desire to be where we are not, or only to
forget.
So in the bronze David now in the Bargello we seem to see youth itself
dreaming after the first victory of all the conquests to come, while a
smile of half-conscious delight, is passing from the lips; tyranny is
dead. It is the first nude statue of the Renaissance made for Cosimo de'
Medici before his exile. For Cosimo, too, the Amorino was made that
study of pure delight, where we find all the joy of the children of the
Cantoria, but without their unction and seriousness. And then in the
portrait busts the young Gattemalata, and the terra-cotta of Niccolo da
Uzzano, we may see Donatello's devotion to mere truthfulness without an
afterthought, as though for him Truth were beauty in its loyalty, at any
rate, to the impression of a moment that for the artist is eternity.
His marvellous equestrian statue of Gattemalata is in Padua, his tomb
and reliefs and statues lie in many an Italian city, but here in the
Bargello we have enough of his work to enable us to divine something at
least of his secret. And this seems to me to have been Donatello's
intention in the art of sculpture: his figures are like gestures of
life, of the soul, sometimes involuntary and full of weariness,
sometimes altogether joyful, but always the expression of a mood of the
soul which is dumb, that in its agony or delight has in his work
expressed itself by means of the body, so that, though he never carves
the body for its own sake, or for the sake of beauty, he is as faithful
in his study of it for the sake of the truth, as he is in his study of
those moods of the soul which through him seem for the first time to
have found an utterance. His life was full of wanderings; beside the
journey to Rome with Brunellesco he went to Siena to make the tomb in
the Duomo there of Bishop Pecci of Grosseto, and in 1433, when Cosimo
de' Medici went into exile, he was again in Rome, and even in Naples.
Returning to Florence after no long time, in 1444, he went to Padua,
where he worked in S. Antonio and made the equestrian statue that was
the wonder of the world. On his return to Florence, an old man, a
certain decadence may be found in his work, so that his reliefs in S.
Lorenzo are not altogether worthy of him, are perhaps the work of a man
who is losing his sight and is already a little dependent on his
pupils. One of these, Bertoldo di Giovanni, who died in 1491, has left
us a beautiful relief of a battle, now in the Bargello, and later we
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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