DONATELLO

 

 

            Donatello has been seen by many as a forerunner of the Italian Renaissance with his expressive forms of sculpture and extravagant relief forms. Further, his realm of influence includes a vast array of Renaissance icons, which played important roles in his art. Although he is revered as a pioneer of the Renaissance, a closer look at historical and expert criticism reveals a more accurate portrait of Donatello.

 

Giorgio Castelfranco, Donatello (1965):

“To my mind the decline in his popularity is due—at least in the relative sense to the fact that it has been difficult for the wider circles of the public to get to know his works . . . Furthermore, the vogue of plaster casts, so widespread down to the end of the First World War, no longer appeals to modern taste.” (7)

 

James David Draper, Donatello (written for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002):

“The powerful expressivity of his art made him the greatest sculptor of the Italian Renaissance.”

 

John Pope-Hennessy, Donatello Sculptor (1993):

“One of the enduring problems posed by Donatello is the diversity of styles in which he worked. As one stylistic phase succeeds another, we inevitably ask ourselves how it was that the artist of the Ascension, steeped in the idiom of the Ara Pacis, became the anticlassicist of the late pulpit reliefs, and how the classicizing sculptor of the svelte Dovizia became the carver of the wooden Magdalen. The answer is that the style in which he worked was invariably determined by the nature of the commission that he undertook. The relief of St. George and the Dragon is addressed to the public in the street, and the Siena Feast of Herod speaks to the visitors to the Baptistry. The less legible reliefs at Padua, in the other hand, were designed for close inspection by members of the Franciscan community, and the introverted post-Passion scenes in San Lorenzo seem to have been originally planned not for a pulpit, but for an altar or a tomb. Donatello’s prime concern was to address the minds of those who came in contact with his work. The marble statues from the Campanile and at Or San Michele, like the bronze David and the Judith, are moral statements, and though we look at them today simply as works of art, this is not the way in which they, or indeed any of his works, were intended to be seen. They are messages transmitted to posterity by one of the most purposeful, most human, and most self-revealing artists who has ever lived.” (317–8)

 

Joachim Poeaschke, Donatello and His World: Sculpture of the Italian Renaissance (1993):

“Donatello, who created sculptures in stone, clay, bronze, and wood, was unquestionably the most important sculptor of the Early Renaissance. He enjoyed close ties to humanists like Alberti and Poggio and was admired for his knowledge of antiquities. His work had enormous influence on the creations of his contemporaries as well as the two generations of artists to follow. But it appears that contemporaries were just as intrigued by his person as by his work, for a number of amusing anecdotes about him were in circulation even during his lifetime. Stripped of their stock rhetorical embellishment, these stories, combined with the documentary source material, provide us with an uncommonly colorful portrait of an artistic personality, one altogether without parallel in the period. They tell us that Donatello was easily excitable and constantly hatching new plans—often as not for hilarious practical jokes.” (376)