John XXIII, whose licentiousness was such that there was nothing for
it but to depose and imprison him. He had, however, much money, and on
his liberation he settled in Florence, presented a true finger of John
the Baptist to the Baptistery, and arranged in return for his bones
to repose in that sanctuary. One of his executors was that Niccolò
da Uzzano, the head of the noble faction in the city, whose coloured
bust by Donatello is in the Bargello. The tomb is exceedingly fine,
the work of Donatello and his partner Michelozzo, who were engaged
to make it by Giovanni de' Medici, the ex-pontiff's friend, and the
father of the great Cosimo. The design is all Donatello's, and his
the recumbent cleric, lying very naturally, hardly as if dead at
all, a little on one side, so that his face is seen nearly full;
the three figures beneath are Michelozzo's; but Donatello probably
carved the seated angels who display the scroll which bears the
dead Pope's name. The Madonna and Child above are by Donatello's
assistant, Pagno di Lapo Portigiani, a pretty relief by whom we saw
in the Museum of the Cathedral. Being in red stone, and very dusty,
like Ghiberti's doors (which want the hose regularly), the lines of
the tomb are much impaired. Donatello is also represented here by a
Mary Magdalene in wood, on an altar at the left of the entrance door,
very powerful and poignant.

In the ordinary way, when visitors to Florence speak of the Baptistery
doors they mean those opposite the Duomo, and when they go to the
Bargello and look at the designs made by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi in
competition, they think that the competition was for those. But that
is wrong. Ghiberti won his spurs with the doors on the north side,
at which comparatively few persons look. The famous doors opposite
the Duomo were commissioned many years later, when his genius was
acknowledged and when he had become so accomplished as to do what