Lorenzo Ghiberti's supposed superiority over his competitors for the doors of San Giovanni was more in his superb finish than in anything else.

The pulpits in San Lorenzo have something about them that is between the art of Donatello and the art of Michael Angelo; we may even owe a large part of the composition in some of the stories to Bertoldo.

Donatello must have needed a man of judgment and ability to carry out the numerous and important commissions that issued from his workshops in his old age.

That Michael Angelo studied the pulpits of San Lorenzo is proved by the numerous motives he took from them in after life; the general aspect of the figures strangely suggests the "terribilita" of his style, and the beginnings of several of his motives can be traced to them, such as the _Centaurs_, the _Pieta_, and, in the Sistine ceiling, the _Adam_; the monochrome putti used as Caryatides; the single putto placed at the springing of two arches; the athletes supporting garlands, similar in proportion to the cherubs supporting garlands used for the capitals of columns in the pulpits; two figures for the spaces over the windows.

The man with the clean-shaven and bird-like face writing in a book and dressed in trousers tied in at the ankles, like the captive barbarians of Roman art, in one of the semi-circular spaces round the windows, is very like a man standing behind the Madonna who supports the dead Christ in the deposition of the pulpit.