The relation of St. George and other Italian works of this period,
both in sculpture and painting, to the Gothic art of France cannot be
ignored, although no adequate explanation has yet been given. St.
George, the Baptists of the Campanile and in Rome, and the marble
David are intensely Franco-Gothic, and precisely what one would expect
to find in France. The technical and physical resemblance between the
two schools may, of course, be a coincidence; it may be purely
superficial. But St. Theodore might well take his place outside Or
San Michele, while the St. George (in spite of the difference in date)
would be in complete ethical harmony with the statues on the portals
of Chartres. Even if they cannot be analysed, the phenomena must be
stated. Donatello may have spontaneously returned to the principles
which underlay the creation of the great statuary of France, the
country of all others where a tremendous school had flourished. But
what these fundamental principles were it is impossible to determine.
It is true there had always been agencies at work which must have
familiarised Italy with French thought and ideas. From the time of the
dominant French influence in Sicily down to the Papal exile in
France--which ended actually while Donatello was working on these
statues, one portion or another of the two countries had been
frequently brought into contact. The Cistercians, for instance, had
been among the most persistent propagators of Gothic architecture in
Italy, though nearly all their churches (of which the ground-plans are
sometimes identical with those of French buildings) are situated in
remote country districts of Italy, and being inaccessible are little
known or studied nowadays. France, however, was herself full of
Italian teachers and churchmen, who may have brought back Northern
ideas of art, for they certainly left small traces of their influence
on the French until later on; their presence, at any rate, records
intercourse between the two countries. A concrete example of the