The Master of Masters

In Florence, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Donatello’s greatest works together reveals the power and influence of the Renaissance sculptor’s innovations.

By John Dorfman

Donatello may well be one of the most radical artists of all time. Virtually single-handedly, he reinvented sculpture in the early 15th century, making it a thoroughly three-dimensional, vital art form. It has been said that he imparted movement to his sculptures; certainly he animated them, in the sense of the Latin word anima, meaning soul. He breathed life into bronze, marble, and clay as no artist had done for the past thousand years. Donatello broke boundaries in other ways, too. His famous bronze David in the Bargello in Florence is the first free-standing, unsupported male nude sculpture made since antiquity. Donatello, though today not as famous as the painters of Quattrocento Florence, was in a sense their master, their model, the progenitor of a new way of representing space, matter, and emotion in art. Artists such as Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were profoundly influenced by him, and for 150 years, until the coming of Caravaggio and the new kind of realism he represented, Donatello’s innovations held sway.

Donatello, David, circa 1435–40, bronze with traces of gilding, 155 x 65 x 60 cm
Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, inv. Bronzi 95

A rare opportunity to observe and appreciate a vast volume of Donatello’s works together, displayed in ways that reflect new art-historical understandings, will begin on March 19 when the exhibition “Donatello, the Renaissance” opens in two venues in Florence, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi Museum and the Musei del Bargello. Curated by Francesco Caglioti, professor of medieval art history at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, the exhibition comprises around 130 sculptures, paintings, and drawings that not only reveal the full range of Donatello’s career and the best of which he was capable, but also place him in the context of his time and show the influence he had on peers. Many of the works on view have been loaned—some for the first time ever—from more than 50 museums and institutions worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Gallery in London, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua, and the Gallerie degli Uffizi and the basilicas of San Lorenzo, Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Some sculptures have even been brought indoors from the public venues where they are usually displayed. This extremely ambitious exhibition, the first major survey of Donatello in 40 years, could only have been put together in Florence, the artist’s home city, where it will be on view through July 31. Modified versions of the show will be on view in London and Berlin in late 2022 and 2023.

Although some of Donatello’s works are so startling in terms of technique and subject matter that they seem to come out of nowhere, he was not, in fact, without artistic precedent; he had his teachers and influences. Born around 1386 in Florence as Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, he was the son of the aforementioned Niccolò di Betto Bardi, a member of the city’s guild of artisans working in wool. Donato, nicknamed Donatello (an endearment meaning “little Donato”), it is said, because of the sweetness of his temperament, was initiated at a young age into the world of craftsmen that his father belonged to. He was educated in the household of the Martelli family, who were powerful bankers and art collectors with ties to the Medicis. Through the Martellis, Donatello was apprenticed to a goldsmith, a trade in which quite a few of the early Renaissance’s great artists got their start. Soon, his talents recognized, he briefly served as an assistant in the studio of Lorenzo Ghiberti, one of the greatest sculptors of the time and less than a decade older than Donatello. Ghiberti, who also came from a goldsmithing background, had the commission, which took him two decades to complete, to create the ornamental panels for the doors of the Florence Baptistery, which Michelangelo dubbed “the Gates of Paradise.” A few years later, Donatello would return to Ghiberti’s studio to work on these doors. In his late teens, he also became a student and friend of Filippo Brunelleschi, the architect who designed the Duomo of Florence. Around 1403, Donatello and Brunelleschi traveled together to Rome to study the Classical art and architecture that was plentiful there; they may have participated in excavations. The exposure to the ruins of Rome was a transformative experience, and somehow Donatello absorbed the essence of the Classical style in such a way that he could imbue his art with it without being slavish or imitative in any way.

Donatello, Cupid-Atys, circa 1435–40, bronze partly gilded, 103 x 55 x 45 cm.
Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, inv. Bronzi 448

Before he was 20 years old, Donatello was already receiving commissions for his work. Brunelleschi had formed him in the Late Gothic style that was then prevalent, and some of its angular stiffness can still be seen clinging to Donatello’s early works. A magisterial marble Saint George from around 1417 stands with hieratic formality and grace, his shield by his side, enclosed within a Gothic niche resembling an architectural element from a church. The contrast between how he began and what he became is clearly visible when one compares an early iteration of the David, from 1408–09, with the great bronze of circa 1435–40. Both take as their subject the young David, before he was king of Israel, when he killed the giant Goliath with his slingshot and then cut his head off. In the earlier version, which is carved in marble, the figure’s posture is somewhat stiff, and the features have a slightly stylized quality. The head of the giant is at his feet, and while the technique and level of detail are formidable, there is little energy in the sculpture.

In the later David, we have something truly astonishing. Unlike the earlier one, which is clothed in a sort of toga, the David of 1435–40 is triumphantly nude, except for a stylish hat adorned with a laurel wreath and a pair of open-toed boots. The body is lithe, its posture insouciant and openly sexual. One hand casually holds Goliath’s sword, while one foot rests on his severed head. The mood of this statue is so much at variance with what one might expect of a Biblical hero that it has occasionally been speculated that it was really intended to represent Mercury or some other Classical figure. But it really is David, and such was the force of Donatello’s imagination and independence that he could imbue anything he touched with the spirit of antiquity as well as the sensual, dynamic, modern spirit that was, at the time, uniquely his. (A 1448 painting by Andrea del Castagno of the medieval military leader Farinata degli Uberti is included in the exhibition because the stance of the subject closely parallels that of Donatello’s later David, a testament to the sculptor’s influence on other artists and other media.)

Donatello, San Rossore Reliquary bust, circa 1422–25, gilded and silvered bronze, 56 x 60.5 x 37 cm.
Pisa, Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, inv. 1720

Another sculpture in “Donatello, Renaissance” that is sure to amaze is the bronze Cupid-Atys, made around the same time as the later David. The figure is unlike anything seen to date, and perhaps ever since. While it has something of the infant Cupid about it, including arms held up as if they were holding a bow and arrow, the torso is strangely developed, with ribs and muscles standing out. The face is illuminated by a grin that is ecstatic but also bespeaks subversive mischief. He has angelic wings and a devilish tail, and—wildly at variance with Classical iconography—a pair of belted trousers that leave the genitals exposed. The Atys of the title was a Phrygian shepherd whom the goddess Cybele loved and consequently made him a priest in her temple. He cheated on her with a river nymph, and in revenge, Cybele drove him insane and made him castrate himself, before finally transforming him into a fir tree. Or so says Ovid in his Metamorphoses. The conflation of this sexualized Cupid with Atys makes a sort of free-associative sense, but it is doubtful that Donatello came up with the title for the sculpture, in any case.

As he matured, Donatello developed to a high degree the ability to infuse his sculptures with a deep pathos. A marble Virgin With Child (circa 1440), known as the Dudley Madonna, shows Mary and Jesus facing each other, their noses almost touching—a dramatic change from the previous artistic norm in which the sacred figures faced the viewer. The tenderness and intimacy of the scene are heightened by the fact that the figures are in a shallow relief rather than sculpted in the round; they seem to emerge out of marble as if the substance were soft and yielding, almost liquid, rather than hard rock. This technique, called schiacciato, was an invention of Donatello’s and became one of his trademarks. In the Florence exhibition, the Dudley Madonna is paired with a marble Virgin and Child (the “Madonna of the Stairs”) carved by Michelangelo 50 years later, that is strikingly similar in its arrangement of the figures  although less tender in its emotion.

Donatello was a long-term recipient of the patronage of the Medici family, and when Cosimo de’ Medici was exile from Florence to Rome in 1433 for a year, the artist went with him, accepting two commissions there. He spent the years 1443–53 in Padua, where he created a triumphant portrait of the condottiere Erasmo da Narni, known as Gattamelata (“Honey-Cat”), who had died in 1443 and whose heirs had invited Donatello to Padua. The sculpture Donatello created to honor Gattamelata showed the warrior mounted on hoseback; it was the first equestrian statue in bronze  to have been made since ancient Rome. When Donatello himself died in 1466, at around the age of 80, he was buried in the Medici tomb in the Basilica of San Lorenzo, next to Cosimo himself.

The 16th-century artist and pioneering art historian Giorgio Vasari said of Donatello, “There is a marvelous suggestion of life bursting out of the stone.” He was referring to the sculptor’s early work, and this magical quality only increased over time. As the present exhibition makes clear, every artist who came after him owes Donatello a debt.