Donatello

• 1. Introduction

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  Donatello, born Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi around 1386 in Florence, made a statue so audacious that nothing in the art of his time seemed to predict it. When his bronze David was recorded in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici in 1469, onlookers encountered the first freestanding nude male sculpture produced since antiquity. A young figure stood casually, one foot resting on the severed head of Goliath, wearing nothing but a hat and boots, the feathers of Goliath's helmet brushing against the inside of his thigh. It was a work described by later historians as "almost incredible innovation" and one that "continues to be far beyond the current of contemporary taste" for the rest of the century. How did a wool-stretcher's son from Florence arrive at this? And what drove a sculptor who was amiable, generous, and notoriously poor at managing money to push every medium he touched into territory no one had dared before?

• 2. A Florentine Education

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  In January 1401, at the age of about 15, Donatello appeared in a court record in Pistoia for hitting a German with a stick and drawing blood. It was an unpromising debut in the documentary record. He was probably there with his father, Niccolò di Betto Bardi, who held an official post in the town while Buonaccorso Pitti served as its governor. In Pistoia, the young Donatello appears to have encountered Filippo Brunelleschi, who was roughly ten years his senior and already working on silver figures for an altar in Pistoia Cathedral.

  Both men returned to Florence in early 1401, in time for Brunelleschi to enter the famous competition for the Florence Baptistery doors, later seen as the founding event of Florentine Renaissance sculpture. Seven sculptors were invited to submit trial panels. The adolescent Donatello was not among them, though Vasari incorrectly claimed he was. The 34 judges declared the entries by Lorenzo Ghiberti and Brunelleschi the finest. An attempt to have the two share the commission collapsed in bitter recriminations that lasted for years, and Ghiberti received it alone.

  After the result in late 1402 or early 1403, Donatello and Brunelleschi left for Rome together, staying at least through the following year. They undertook what was effectively an archaeological expedition, measuring ancient remains, hiring laborers to excavate, and probably supporting themselves with work for Roman goldsmiths. Antonio Manetti, who knew both men and wrote Brunelleschi's biography in the 1470s, is the main source for this period. The experience shaped the classical vocabulary Donatello would spend his career transforming. By 1404, he was back in Florence and apprenticed in Ghiberti's studio, working on the Baptistery bronze doors and then on stone carvings for the cathedral's Porta della Mandorla.

• 3. Stone Saints, Public Space

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  By early 1408, Donatello had enough standing to be awarded a commission for a life-size prophet for Florence Cathedral, paired with a figure by Nanni di Banco, described as both a rival and a friend. The Florentine cathedral complex and the Orsanmichele building across the city became the proving grounds for a new kind of public sculpture. Between 1414 and 1435, he was responsible for six of the eight marble campanile figures for Giotto's bell tower. The last of these, the Zuccone, known informally as "Baldy" or "Pumpkin Head" and probably intended as Habakkuk or Jeremiah, was reportedly Donatello's own favourite among his works.

  At Orsanmichele, a building the guilds of Florence were converting from a grain market into a church, Donatello's marble Saint Mark for the linen-weavers guild demonstrated a telling piece of psychology. The guild disliked the finished statue when they viewed it at ground level. Donatello had them raise it into its niche and cover it while he pretended to rework it. Two weeks later, without having touched the statue, he revealed it in position. They happily accepted it. The pose used contrapposto, with the robe on the weight-bearing leg falling in vertical folds described as resembling the flutes of a Doric column.

  His marble Saint George for the armourers' confraternity, completed around 1415-1417, stood in a shallower niche than the others because a staircase occupied the space behind the wall. Rather than working around this, Donatello turned the constraint into an effect, pushing the figure forward into space and giving him an expression of alertness that Renaissance commentators singled out as the work's defining quality. Holes in the marble suggest the figure originally held a bronze sword or lance and wore a wreath or helmet. To solve the cathedral's problem of statues appearing too small when viewed from far below, Donatello proposed with Brunelleschi a large but lightweight figure: a prophet Joshua built around a brick core, covered in modelled clay or terracotta and painted white. Installed after 1415 and standing there until the 18th century, it was known as the "White Colossus," or in Latin, homo magnus et albus.

• 4. Stiacciato and the Relief Revolution

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  The base of the Saint George for Orsanmichele carried a marble relief called Saint George Freeing the Princess, described as Donatello's "first milestone" in a technique he was inventing: stiacciato, meaning "flattened-out." Where other sculptors, including Ghiberti in his celebrated "Gates of Paradise" doors begun in 1424, mixed very high and very low relief in the same composition, Donatello kept everything shallow. Figures projected slightly, but through skilful overlaps were drawn back into what one scholar described as "a tightly-stretched unified skin-plane," suggesting depth without breaking the surface.

  The technique reached a new level of ambition in bronze at the Siena Baptistery. Ghiberti had been involved since 1417 in a project for six relief panels for the baptismal font. By 1423 he had not started work, and one relief, The Feast of Herod, was reassigned to Donatello. Placed low so its base sat at approximately knee height, the composition works with that viewing angle. At the left, Herod recoils as John the Baptist's severed head is presented on a platter; Salome still dances at the centre; musicians play in a space behind them; and beyond that, John's head is presented again to two figures, one presumably Herodias. The composition uses two vanishing points rather than one, which historians have suggested was intentional, designed to produce an unconscious sense of tension and disharmony in the viewer.

  Donatello's Chellini Madonna, a round bronze relief about 28.5 centimetres across, showed how far his thinking extended. Cast at an even thickness throughout, the reverse carries a perfect intaglio impression of the front-facing image, apparently intended to serve as a mould for molten glass. He gave it to his friend and physician Giovanni Chellini in 1456.

• 5. Partnership and Dispute

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  Around 1425, Donatello entered a formal partnership with Michelozzo, a sculptor and architect roughly ten years his junior who had trained at the mint making dies for coins. The arrangement addressed a structural problem: Donatello was by all accounts a quick and gifted maker but a poor organiser of his workshop, while Michelozzo excelled at the management side. Michelozzo, for his part, wanted to extract himself from an existing arrangement with Ghiberti.

  Their first major collaboration was the Tomb of Antipope John XXIII in the Florence Baptistery, completed between 1425 and 1428. Donatello made the recumbent bronze figure of the deceased; Michelozzo and assistants carved the stone figures. The result, described as elegantly integrating varied elements into a narrow vertical space, became the standard model for ambitious wall tombs throughout the following century.

  The partnership continued for nine years in total. It was Donatello's failure to deliver his portion of an exterior pulpit for Prato Cathedral that contributed to its dissolution. The commission began in 1428. Prato's authorities chased him relentlessly, eventually requiring the intervention of Cosimo de' Medici himself. The reliefs of dancing children, described as a "veritable bacchanalian dance of half-nude putti, pagan in spirit," were delivered only in 1438 and were not believed to have been carved by Donatello himself, though designed by him. The partnership was not renewed in 1434, though the two men remained on amicable terms.

• 6. Padua and the Equestrian Question

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  In 1443, Donatello was called to Padua by the heirs of Erasmo da Narni, the condottiere known as Gattamelata, meaning "Honey-Cat," who had died that year. The resulting equestrian monument was the first life-size equestrian statue cast in bronze since antiquity. Designing and planning began in 1443 or 1444; the casting was done mostly in 1447 or 1448; the bronze work was finished in 1450; the statue was not installed on its stone pedestal until 1453.

  The commission was unexpectedly large. Gattamelata's will had called for a relatively modest tomb inside the church where he was buried. The Venetian government then ordered a grand public monument for a general who had served them for less than a decade. A contributing factor may have been a competing equestrian monument in nearby Ferrara for Niccolò III d'Este, Marquis of Ferrara, by two Florentine sculptors, one of them a pupil of Donatello. That statue, slightly smaller than life-size and showing the marquis in civilian dress, had been in place by 1451 before French forces destroyed it in 1796.

  Donatello placed the Gattamelata on the square outside the Basilica of Saint Anthony, a famous pilgrimage church locally called il Santo. He likely knew the ancient Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome and may have seen the late Roman Regisole at Ravenna. The horse's form may derive from the ancient Horses of Saint Mark in Venice. Andrea del Caldiere, a Paduan metalworker, led the casting team. The classical motifs worked into the armour and saddle are, as one writer noted, almost impossible to see in situ. Donatello remained based in Padua for ten years, completing a bronze crucifix for il Santo, a Madonna and Child enthroned with six flanking bronze saints, and twenty-one bronze reliefs. His presence there was felt in local painting as well as sculpture, and Padua became for a time one of the leading Italian centres for small bronze table sculptures in the decades after he left.

• 7. Character and Private Life

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  A tax return from 1427, filed near the peak of Donatello's career, showed a much lower income than Ghiberti's for the same year. He seems to have died in modest circumstances in 1466, though Vasari wrote that "he was very happy in his old age." He apparently kept a bucket of money hanging from the ceiling of his workshop on a cord, from which anyone around him could take whatever they needed.

  All accounts described him as amiable and well-liked, but unable to manage the business of his career. He repeatedly took on more commissions than he could fulfill, a pattern compared by his contemporaries to Michelangelo a century later. Completed work was often years late, handed to other sculptors to finish, or never produced at all. He had at most times a relatively small number of experienced assistants, some of whom became significant sculptors in their own right. Technical faults appear in his bronze work; even the famous bronze David has a hole under the chin and a patch on the thigh.

  A collection of celebrity anecdotes compiled around 1480, probably by the humanist Angelo Poliziano, tutor to Lorenzo de' Medici's children, includes several that point to Donatello's sexual interest in men. These tell of him surrounding himself with "handsome assistants," hiring especially beautiful boys, and a reconciliation with a departing assistant described through slang. The bronze David itself carries sensuous touches that go well beyond what the political symbolism of the subject required. No denunciations for sodomy appear in the Florentine archives under Donatello's name, though those records are incomplete. The Medici, who were his most consistent patrons throughout his career, appear to have offered him reliable protection.

• 8. Legacy and Late Work

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  Donatello's final major project, begun in his last years with the help of assistants and left unfinished at his death on the 13th of December 1466, was a series of bronze reliefs assembled in the following century into two pulpits for San Lorenzo in Florence, the Medici burial church. Some panels appear to have been cast from unfinished clay models. The range in quality across and within individual panels is striking; the treatment of space is described as "absolutely uncompromising" in its use of every means to express emotion and suffering.

  When he died, the graceful style he had helped create decades earlier dominated Florentine sculpture. His own late manner, its boldness described as overwhelming and even incomprehensible to younger sculptors, had to wait for Verrocchio and Antonio del Pollaiuolo before finding successors willing to explore its expressive range. In Padua, his student Bartolomeo Bellano returned by 1469 and remained the city's leading sculptor, eventually passing that role to his own pupil Andrea Riccio, who lived until about 1532.

  Michelangelo's David, completed in 1501, has been called both an ode and a challenge to Donatello. The shallow relief style Donatello pioneered was taken up by almost no one after his death, with Michelangelo's early Madonna of the Stairs, carved around 1490, standing as one rare essay in the form. Giorgio Vasari, writing a century after the fact, traced a direct line of sculptural succession from Donatello to Michelangelo through Bertoldo di Giovanni, a pupil of Donatello who later ran an informal academy in Lorenzo de' Medici's garden. That line, however neat Vasari made it, ran through a sculptor who in his own lifetime could not be contained by any tradition he touched.