How Donatello shaped the Renaissance

No Renaissance statue is more famous than Michelangelo’s David, carved at the start of the 16th century. Yet the five-metre-tall nude owes a debt to a much smaller, bronze sculpture that Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi, or Donatello, created roughly half a century earlier. This David, a beguiling figure with a sensual, curved body, stands on the severed head of Goliath. One hand grasps the shaft of a sword; the other cups a pouch of stones. It was the first free-standing male nude since antiquity.

A plaster cast of Donatello’s David, made in 1885, is one of around 130 busts, bas-reliefs, carvings, drawings and paintings on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, the first major exhibition devoted to Donatello in Britain. Six centuries after he worked, the Florentine artist is experiencing something of a renaissance. He was the subject of an extensive show at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and Bargello Museum in Florence last year, which marked the first time that four of his precious bronzes were moved from their religious settings. The State Museums in Berlin recently presented his works too. Together, these related but distinct exhibitions form a magnificent tribute to one of the most important sculptors in Western art history.

Donatello was born into a family of clothworkers in 1386. As a teenager, documents suggest, he trained as a goldsmith, like many artists of the era. The techniques he learned—moulding wax models, casting objects in precious metals, and embellishing—were valuable during the 1400s, or Quattrocento. Workshops were full of artisans working on decorations for Florence’s monumental cathedral, the pinnacle of the city’s creative aspirations. Donatello’s skills attracted the attention of Lorenzo Ghiberti, an early Renaissance master, who employed him to work on the 28 brass reliefs that would adorn the north entrance of the Baptistry. Ghiberti paid his assistant handsomely, an early indication of his talent.

During the early Renaissance, artists were renewing ideas from the ancients. Donatello spurred this revival, borrowing from classical imagery long before he cast his ambiguous David in bronze. Take the elegant youth he carved in marble around 1409, another David (pictured, below left). His robes hang tantalisingly open, the delicate folds drawing the viewer’s eye towards his not-quite-concealed thigh. Amaranth leaves—perhaps a reference to the hunter-turned-flower of Greek myth—adorn the victor’s curls. Beneath his feet, the hirsute Goliath, though decapitated, with a rock wedged in his forehead, seems to be peacefully sleeping. This graceful hero could have been capering around Mount Olympus with the deities, rather than felling Philistine giants. Donatello moulded in terracotta too. Few European artists had bothered to bake clay since the Romans.

He had an exceptional ability to breathe life into his subjects, in marble, wood and even bronze—the most technically challenging material to work with. Viewers might laugh along with his chortling spiritelli, the mythical sprites who cavort about the exterior pulpit of the cathedral in Prato. Mothers, in particular, may feel a pang on encountering the “Virgin and Child (Pazzi Madonna)”, a moment of profound intimacy that Donatello captured in around 1425 by making shallow incisions into snowy-white marble (pictured, below). Donatello “draws out what it is to be a human being and that transcends time”, says Peta Motture, the lead curator of the show in London. The bas-relief is also a glorious example of the rilievo schiacciato (squashed relief) technique that Donatello pioneered. But he was much more than a formal innovator. He was imaginative too, and for modern audiences, this can mean plenty of guesswork.

Among the most enigmatic of his creations is the Attis-Amorino, a bronze cherub (pictured, above right) caught in some sort of ecstasy—possibly opioid-induced, if the poppy seeds on his belt are anything to go by. Who is this mythological creature with a tail, the viewer wonders? And why do his breeches sag open at his genitals? All this is what makes Donatello’s work so exciting, argues Ms Motture. You can decipher some “messages that would have been understood at the time…and some we just cannot fathom”, she says.

When Donatello died in 1466, his patrons, the powerful Medicis who lorded over Florence, buried him near Cosimo de’ Medici in the crypt of San Lorenzo church. It was quite the climb for someone from the working-class Oltrarno neighbourhood. But his artistic spirit lived on in the Cinquecento when his followers—including Michelangelo—drew on their forebear’s use of perspective, emotion and classical forms in their own enthralling artworks. The Renaissance is synonymous with three big names, says the curator, referring to Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and the painter of the Sistine Chapel. This exhibition makes a persuasive case for Donatello to be the fourth. ■

“Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance” is showing at the V&A in London until June 11th.

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