ABSTRACT
"It is a book for the 'whole life', it is very much a book for 'stone alive'," Ezra Pound wrote admiringly in his review of the first volume of Adrian Stokes's quattrocento trilogy, The Quattro Cento, following its publication in June 1932. As illustration he described at length a quattrocento marble basin, or lavabo, created by Verrocchio in the old sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence. Donatello deplored by contrast the "elegance" and "reserve" of the doors designed by Ghiberti for the baptistery of Florence Cathedral. He also deplored what he described as the "guilty-conscious emphasis on what is calm and on what is sweet" in the sculpture of Luca della Robbia. Sometime, Pound hoped, Stokes would tell the story of how he told the eminent art critic, Bernard Berenson, "where to git off at". Stokes, however, did not tell this story in the second volume of his quattrocento trilogy.
