Why did Donatello reinvent sculpture?

Legend has it, or rather Giorgio Vasari, that the friends Donatello and Brunelleschi argued over a Christ when they were young.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
24 June 2022 Friday 19:12
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Why did Donatello reinvent sculpture?

Legend has it, or rather Giorgio Vasari, that the friends Donatello and Brunelleschi argued over a Christ when they were young. The first of them showed his colleague a crucifix that he had just sculpted and the author of the famous dome in Florence did not resist criticizing him, accusing him of excessive realism. "It seems that you have put a peasant on the cross," he snapped. Donatello challenged him. “Take a piece of firewood and do it yourself”. After two years Brunelleschi invited him to dinner at his house and when he opened the door, Donatello bumped into a Christ of perfect proportions (open arms measure the same as height). He was so amazed that he dropped the eggs he was carrying to cook on the ground.

Both works never left Florence, where they can be found at one end of the city and the other. The first can be seen in the Basilica of Santa Croce while the second presides over a chapel in Santa Maria Novella. Now, more than 600 years later, they have come together for the first time in the exhibition Donatello, the Renaissance with which Florence seeks to update and vindicate the work of one of its great artists. First, in his own city with the exhibition that will travel to Germany starting in September and to the United Kingdom in early 2023, specifically to the Saatliche Museen in Berlin and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, collaborators of the show. But also in Italy itself, where a route has been created with sixteen stages and more than fifty works spread throughout the Tuscany region to discover the creator who revolutionized sculpture, a pioneer together with Brunelleschi of the modern age of art.

Born in 1386 and died in 1466, there is no anniversary to commemorate Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, better known as Donatello. "It is not necessary to wait for anniversaries to address such important issues," argues art history professor Francesco Caglioti, considered the greatest expert on the artist and curator of the exhibition. "He is very important and he had never enjoyed the treatment he deserves: until now very few exhibitions had been dedicated to him - three in almost 150 years - and none had been conceived with the necessary breadth," he continues.

So Italy has decided to do justice to one of its most decisive figures. “She can be considered a symbol of Western art, the architect of a revolution that shook the foundations of the way of creating”, emphasizes Caglioti. Now the necessary circumstances have arisen to bring together his main works, both from Florence and from other parts of Italy and from international museums. This is the case of the Louvre, the Metropolitan in New York or the National Gallery. "It is an impossible exhibition, the most complete and exhaustive," says Arturo Galansino, general director of the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, the venue for the exhibition next to the Bargello Museum. Composed of almost 130 own pieces and those of other artists who confront him, from Brunelleschi to Masaccio, Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael or Michelangelo, it also brings together some works that for the first time leave their place of origin, the one for which they were created, such as the bronze doors of the old sacristy of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence, commissioned by the Medici, or the relief Banquet of Herod, Faith and Hope of the baptismal font in Siena.

And all this to give a vision of what the Florentine's work meant at the dawn of the Renaissance. In the beginning he worked in Ghiberti's workshop and his first works allow us to verify the passage from the old medieval school to the new creative airs that, together with Brunelleschi, he went to breathe in Rome, where he took note of the classical past. The recovery of antiquity to update it is part of the backbone of him as an artist. In this way, he returned to using techniques that had fallen into disuse, such as terracotta sculpture, well explained in the book Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder, and which he puts into practice by sculpting virgins with children of great expressive beauty, another of the characteristics of his work, which explores the psychological dimension and models the modern concept of humanity.

The capacity for innovation and its transgressive spirit are evident with another recovery from the past, the 'spiritelli', that is, naked and winged cupids, which often replace angels. The most relevant example is what is considered the first pagan statue of the Renaissance, the humorous Amore-Attis. "Donatello is a breakthrough phenomenon who introduced new ways of thinking, producing and living art, perhaps he is the most original and revolutionary artist in the entire history of Western art," insists the expert.

And among the technical novelties that he introduced, the use of the 'stiacciato' stands out, a very subtle relief with a sense of perspective, the one that his friend Brunelleschi conceived and made fashionable among his contemporaries as the main characteristic of the Renaissance. Beautiful examples of this technique are the warm marble works the Madonna Pazzi or the Madonna Dudley, the latter from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He portrays the Virgin in profile attending to her son, ignoring the viewer, a model that will serve later artists, starting with Michelangelo himself.

Precisely, one of the objectives of this recovery of the figure of Donatello is to "exemplify to what extent he was the guiding artist of the Renaissance", explains Paola D'Agostino, director of the Bargello Museum. Caglioti goes further: “the number of followers he had in the fifteenth century, both in sculpture and painting, is incalculable. In the XVI, his names - Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Bronzino, Jacopo Sansovino, Benvenuto Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli and so many others - suffice to tell us the immensity and depth of the influence of this great master ” .

A master who also stood out and innovated in his works in bronze, a material with which he gradually preferred over the years, with both small and large format examples. He pioneered 'old-fashioned' equestrian monuments with the statue of Condottiere Gattamelata in Padua; without forgetting his works in wood, whose maximum exponent is the Penitent Mary Magdalene from the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence, of unprecedented pathos and realism.

The exhibition at the Strozzi Palace offers a chronological and thematic tour, while at the Bargello you can see some of his masterpieces, such as the David he created for the Medici or the famous Saint George of Orsanmichelle, usually exhibited in this ancient Florentine palace . For the occasion, the Marzocco of the Palazzo Vecchio, the lion that symbolizes Florence, has also been moved there. "The loans that will travel to Berlin and London have not yet been determined," says the commissioner. What is clear is that these three emblematic works will not leave the city. Nor the famous crucifixes by Donatello and Brunelleschi, which offer an impressive welcome to the visitor in the first room of the Strozzi Palace, which already justifies the entrance.

The itinerary concludes with another Christ on the cross modeled almost four decades after the first, this time in bronze, and with a closer resemblance to the one sculpted by his friend. Of course, his face is much more expressive, as befits Donatello, a sculptor who approached human feelings like no one else.