and so forth; but the definition is incomplete, cataloguing the
effects without analysing their cause. Whether Donatello was
influenced by the ultimate cause or not, he certainly assimilated some
of the effects. The most obvious example of the Gothic feeling which
permeated this child of the Renaissance, is his naturalistic
portrait-statues. Donatello found the form, some passing face or
figure in the street, and rapidly impressed it with his ideal.
Raffaelle found his ideal, and waited for the bodily form wherewith to
clothe it. "In the absence of good judges and handsome women"--that is
to say, models, he paused, as he said in one of his letters to
Castiglione. One feels instinctively that with his Gothic bias
Donatello would not have minded. He did not ask for applause, and at
the period of St. George classical ideas had not introduced the
professional artist's model. Life was still adequate, and the only
model was the subject in hand. The increasing discovery of classical
statuary and learning made the later sculptors distrust their own
interpretation of the bodily form, which varied from the primitive
examples. Thus they lost conviction, believing the ideal of the
classicals to surpass the real of their own day. The result was
Bandinelli and Montorsoli, whose world was inhabited by pompous
fictions. They neither attained the high character of the great
classical artists nor the single-minded purpose of Donatello. Their
ideal was based on the unrealities of the Baroque.

[Footnote 40: "Mélanges d'Histoire," p. 248.]

[Footnote 41: Introduction, i. 122.]

[Footnote 42: "Vita de' Architetti," 53.]