unduly big; Michael Angelo started with the same mistake: witness his
David and the Madonna on the Stairs. It was a mistake soon rectified
in either case. But till late in life Donatello never quite succeeded
in giving nerve or occupation to his hands. St. Mark, St. Peter, and
St. John all have a book in their left hands, but none of them _hold_
the book; it has no weight, the hand shows no grip and has no sense of
possession. Neither did Donatello always know where to put the hands,
giving them the shy and self-conscious positions affected by the
schoolboy. The Bargello David is a case in point. His hands are idle,
they have really nothing to do, and their position is arbitrary in
consequence. It is all a descent from the Gothic, where we find much
that is inharmonious and paradoxical, and a frequent lack of concord
between the component parts. St. George, standing erect in his niche,
holds the shield in front of him, its point resting on the ground.
But, notwithstanding the great progress made by Donatello in
modelling these hands--(so much indeed that one might almost suspect
the bigger hands of contemporary statues to be faithful portraits of
bigger hands)--one feels that the shield does not owe its upright
position to the constraint of the hands. They do not reflect the
outward pressure of the heavy shield, which could almost be removed
without making it necessary to modify their functions or position. It
was reserved for Michael Angelo to achieve the unity of purpose and
knowledge needed in portraying the human hand. He was the first among
Italian sculptors to render the relation of the hand to the wrist, the
wrist to the forearm, and thence to the shoulder and body. In the
fifteenth century nobody fully understood the sequence of muscles
which correlates every particle of the limb, and Donatello could not
avoid the halting and inconclusive outcome of his inexperience.

[Footnote 27: Discourses, 1778, p. 116.]