Donatello

Italian sculptor

• Born: c. 1386
• Birthplace: Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: December 13, 1466
• Place of death: Florence (now in Italy)

One of the first great European artists to articulate fully the principles of perspective, Donatello has had an incalculable influence on his successors, who have derived their inspiration from his highly naturalistic and intense dramatizations of the human form.

Early Life

Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, better known as Donatello (doh-nah-TEHL-loh), was the son of a wool carder. Very little is known about his life, except what can be surmised from contemporary records (such as payments to him for commissioned work) and from a biographical sketch in Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani (1549-1550; Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1850-1907) by Giorgio Vasari, an Italian architect, writer, and painter. Vasari, however, is not entirely reliable on the subject of his predecessors. It is known that Donatello lost his father while still a young boy and that he lived with his mother until his middle forties, when she died. He never married. According to Vasari, the artist was a poor but generous man.

Donatello’s native city of Florence had been an Etruscan city, founded before Rome. Florence had a long tradition as a center of commerce and pleasure, where a young man such as Donatello could learn art and the practical skills of business. He was trained in the Stonemasons’ Guild and was the master of many crafts, including goldsmithing, the making of inlays, engraving, carving, and the application of stucco ornaments to furniture.

The first record of Donatello as an artist (May, 1403) puts him in the shop of Lorenzo Ghiberti, a pioneer in the use of perspective, a technique that gives depth and three-dimensional quality to paintings and relief sculpture. By 1406, Donatello was at work on small marble figures of prophets for the Porta della Mandorla of the Duomo of Florence. On February 20, 1408, he received his first major commission, for a marble figure of David.

Life’s Work

Donatello’s first major work, the David in the Palazzo Vecchio, is a marble figure measuring 6 feet, 3.5 inches (192 centimeters). The massive head of Goliath rests at David’s feet. Standing with his legs parted, David is a lithe, almost delicate figure, draped in a close-fitting cloak that emphasizes the youthful muscularity of his figure. His long right arm accentuates the power of the slingshot throw that brought Goliath to earth. The fingers of the right hand are bent in a grasping pose and were probably meant to hold a sling that has been lost. There is great vitality and strength in the sculpture, even though David is not depicted in action, because of the economy and the expressive precision of the details Donatello dramatizes, such as the way the index and middle fingers of his left hand press against his torso. Although David is a religious figure and embodies a myth, he is presented as an individual, a remarkable personality worthy of close inspection.

With the marble figure of Saint John the Evangelist , now in the southern aisle of the Duomo of Florence, Donatello made a larger-than-life statue that surpasses the David in the dynamic rendering of personality. Working with a somewhat shallow block of marble, the artist shaped the upper half of the body in high relief, thus leaving enough marble for the seated figure’s thighs. By giving the figure no back, he foregrounded those aspects of Saint John’s person he wished to highlight. It is the saint’s human qualities, his piercing eyes and grave demeanor, that rivet the viewer. With book in hand, held meditatively, he appears as the very embodiment of the prayerful man.

Saint George and the Dragon , a marble relief on the outside of the Or San Michele in Florence, is noteworthy for Donatello’s use of mountain and forest landscapes. As in his previous work, there is a beautiful rendering of naturalistic elements, a grounding in the reality of human emotions and settings. The representation of such scenes in the Middle Ages was more formulaic, more centered on a static composition of all the elements of the myth. In Donatello, rearing horse, rider, and dragon collide, so that the meaning of the myth arises primarily out of the sense of movement. Donatello’s sculpture is not so much allegory (a pictorial evocation of myth) as it is an action in itself, a story evolving out of the artist’s powerful dramatic technique.

The Feast of Herod (also known as the Dance of Salome), when compared to Pietro Lorenzetti’ earlier painting of the same name, confirms Donatello’s deft handling of realistic human figures in dramatic settings. In Lorenzetti’s work, each of the seven figures is carefully spaced and distinctly visible in the foreground and background. The scene is frozen, made static, so that the picture is complete, the story intact. In Donatello’s bronze relief for the Siena Cathedral font, five figures in the foreground of the right side of the relief draw back in horror at the presented head of John the Baptist. One man partially covers his face with his hand, as though the full sight of the head is more than he can bear. The other four figures are drawn back, but a woman in profile perhaps the dancing Salome stares fixedly at the head. These five figures are bunched together, obscuring a full view of their faces. Indeed, one face cannot be seen at all only a headdress is visible. The realism, drama, and human complexity of the reactions to this atrocity demonstrate how intensely Donatello wished to convey the very life of events and personalities and not merely their symbolism. His use of composition to render the psychology of his subjects is evident in the left side of the bronze relief, where five distinctly positioned figures complete the foregrounding of the work and relieve the congestion of the right side. There is an exquisite balance achieved in the framing of the scene, quite different from Lorenzetti’s proportioning of space.

Between 1411 and 1427, Donatello received commissions to work on figures of Saint John the Evangelist and Saint George and the Dragon, the Sacrifice of Isaac, the tomb of Baldassare Cossa (Pope John XXIII), the Head of a Prophet, the Head of a Sibyl, and others for the Or San Michele, the Opera del Duomo, and the cathedral of Orvieto all in Florence. In 1430, he went to Rome for three years and carved several tombs. By 1433, he had returned to Florence to design several stained-glass windows, marble tombs, and bronze heads.

One of Donatello’s most notable works from this period and said to have been his favorite is the so-called Zuccone (pumpkinhead, or baldhead). Again, it is the strong personality of the figure that is so commendable to modern taste. The long angular face, accentuated by the tilt of the head downward, the long loosely flexed right arm, with the right hand casually thrust inside a belt, are all aspects of a highly individualized figure. This is a person with his own peculiar outlook on the world, not simply a study of human form, and a figure with a posture that bends with life.

The bronze David, the Equestrian Monument of General Gattamelata , and Mary Magdalen are representative examples of the power and variety of Donatello’s final period of creativity. It seemed to the artist’s contemporaries that David was cast from life, so natural and playful does this slight figure appear. There is a joy and a lightness in this work that is entirely different from the earlier David in marble. The bronze statue of General Gattamelata, which stands in front of the Church Sant’ Antonio in Padua, where the artist lived for nearly ten years, is a ruggedly determined depiction of the commander in chief of the Venetian military forces who died at Padua on January 16, 1443. The tough, chiseled quality of the face and the tight and slight grimness in the lips bespeak a man girding himself for battle with the poised calm of a great leader. As Ludwig Goldscheider notes, the wood carving of Mary Magdalen is an especially vivid example of Donatello’s final naturalistic phase. The roughly hewn wood exaggerates the worn, beaten-looking, bony face, with its broken-toothed, grotesque mouth, while the strong hands, with fingers not quite touching one another in the sign of prayer, suggest the spirituality that inheres in this crude body.

Significance

Donatello is regarded as one of the great innovators of Renaissance art. The bronze David, for example, is one of the first nude freestanding Renaissance statues. His great contributions were recognized in his time, especially at Padua, where he was the head of an enormous workshop. In his last years, he created an extraordinary set of reliefs for the pulpits of San Lorenzo. Most of his work remains in Florence, although an unfinished David is exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and a Madonna is in the Boston Museum.

The portrayal of human bodies is certainly one of Donatello’s greatest achievements. The personality seems to express itself from within his dynamic figures, and there is never the sense that the faces he gives his figures are simply imposed on them. In the perfect disposition of each physical feature, of every detail of clothing and setting, the artist perfects both the objective and psychological points of view. His figures are real people in a real world, observed with sharp accuracy.

Donatello can rightly be regarded as one of the precursors of modern art because his sculpture is autonomous, a thing in itself that is never simply illustrative of the subjects he carved and casted. Like his contemporary Fra Angelico, Donatello excels in the dramatization of whole scenes, relying not only on his deft manipulation of human figures but also on his profound understanding of architecture and of the spaces his figures and objects occupy. Where he differs from Fra Angelico is in the heroic quality of so many of his human figures. It is, in the last analysis, his ability to portray depth powerfully in his human subjects and in his settings that continues to make his work worthy of the most serious study.

Bibliography

Avery, Charles. Donatello: An Introduction. New York: Icon Editions, 1994. A concise, illustrated survey of the life and work of Donatello, this book provides balanced coverage of Donatello’s sculpture in different media and in different cities of Italy, and discusses his importance and indifference. An ideal introduction for general readers, tourists, or students, Avery’s book shows how Donatello’s influence helped to create a new humanism that was a hallmark of the Renaissance.

Donatello. Donatello. Florence: Giunti, 1999. A catalog of Donatello’s sculpture. Contains 44 leaves of plates, mostly color.

Gaeta Bertelà, Giovanna. Donatello. New York: Riverside, 1991. An analysis and examination of Donatello’s works, with information on his life. Bibliography and index.

Jolly, Anna. Madonnas by Donatello and His Circle. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. An examination of artistic treatments of the Virgin Mary by Donatello and his contemporaries. Bibliography.

Poeschke, Joachim. Donatello and His World: Sculptures of the Italian Renaissance. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1993. An examination of Donatello’s sculptures and other sculptures created at this time. Illustrated. Bibliography and index.

Pope-Hennessy, John. Donatello, Sculptor. New York: Abbeville Press, 1993. An analysis of Donatello’s sculpture, including those for the Or San Michele and the Campanile and the Madonnas. Also looks at Donatello’s partnership with Michelozzo. Illustrated. Bibliography and index.