The one is a Christian soldier ready to engage Apollyon in battle to the death; the other the boy-hero of a marvellous romance.

The body in both is but the shrine of an indwelling soul, the instrument and agent of a faith-directed will; and the crown of their conflict is no wreath of laurel or of parsley.

In other words, the value of S.George and David to the sculptor lay not in their strength and youthful beauty--though he has endowed them with these excellent gifts--so much as in their significance for the eternal struggle of the soul with evil.

The same power of expressing Christian sentiment in a form of perfect beauty, transcending the Greek type by profounder suggestion of feeling, is illustrated in the well-known low-relief of an angel's head in profile, technically one of Donatello's most masterly productions.[90] It is no part of my present purpose to enumerate the many works of Donatello in marble and bronze; yet some allusion to their number and variety is necessary in order to show how widely his influence was diffused through Italy.

In the monuments of Pope John XXIII., of Cardinal Brancacci, and of Bartolommeo Aragazzi, he subordinated his genius to the treatment of sepulchral and biographical subjects according to time-honoured Tuscan usage.