Among the great 15th-century Italian artists who became the namesakes of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Michelangelo and Leonardo may be the most popular, and Raphael’s art may be the most beautiful, but none is as important in the story of the Renaissance than Donatello. The case for Donatello’s preeminence in the history of the development of Western art is now being made in an extraordinary exhibit of over a hundred works, being held in Florence, Italy, at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Musei del Bargello through July 31.
Donatello was not only the primus inter pares among his Italian artistic colleagues, as “Donatello: The Renaissance” shows, but was also the literal first among them. He introduced the artistic innovations that would become emblematic of the rebirth of classical art in the modern world.
Born as Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi in Florence in 1386 to a family of modest means, Donatello came of age at a time of exciting incipient changes in the world of art. The Italian city-states and principalities were regaining an interest in Greek and Roman antiquity, dropping the medieval and Gothic styles of art that favored highly spiritualized depictions of the human and of the natural world. Forms of painting and sculpture that more fully embraced the classical values of rationality, realism, and the unabashed celebration of naturalistic human beauty were coming to be more favored. Even church officials took part in the newfound appreciation of the old, alongside the rising merchant class and important patrons such as the Medici. Donatello, who had been training in this classical style of art for several years in Rome, was perfectly poised to capitalize on his native Tuscany’s growing admiration for classical art.
This exhibit gathers over 130 of Donatello’s artworks from over 50 museums from around the world alongside works by scores of his artistic contemporaries, a once-in-a-dozen-generations look at this master and why he matters. The result is a historic exhibition that shows how an unassuming artist from a humble background changed art history.
The work that best shows Donatello’s importance is Feast of Herod, which he created as a decoration for the baptismal font of the Siena Cathedral in 1425, and which has remained firmly in its place in Siena for the past now-almost 600 years. Donatello depicts a scene from the New Testament in which Herod is brought the head of John the Baptist on a serving platter, the sadistic king having granted his daughter anything she wished and who, at the urging of her mother, demanded the immediate death of the prophet in such a fashion.
Unlike the medieval artists who preceded him, who were more concerned with presenting idealized versions of human figures and the space they occupy, Donatello depicts each man and woman in the frame with groundbreaking detail — a reflection of the burgeoning individualism that would become one of the defining features of Renaissance art and thought. And rather than present the scene as occurring on a flat, unrealistic, ethereal plane, as artists from the preceding millennia tended to do in their biblical scenes, Donatello portrays this incident as occurring in a real space in the real world. Medieval painters and sculptors had been depicting biblical episodes for centuries, but none captured the human drama and roiling emotions of such scenes in the way that the Tuscan does in the Feast of Herod. We can almost feel the shock in the banquet hall ourselves as Herod and his guests recoil in horror at the severed head of the proto-Christian prophet being set before them on the table as if it were the soup of the day.
Early Renaissance artists such as Masaccio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Donatello’s colleague and friend Filippo Brunelleschi were rediscovering the secrets of perspective and reintroducing it into Italian art, but none was as proficient and pioneering in his use of perspective as Donatello. The influence of Donatello’s virtuosic use of perspective in Feast of Herod can clearly be seen in Leonardo’s Last Supper (1495) and Raphael’s School of Athens (1509). These paintings are more famous, but Donatello’s seminal frieze came first.
While Donatello’s influence on painting was decisive, he worked primarily as a sculptor. “Donatello: The Renaissance” appropriately focuses most of its space and attention on that work. Juxtaposing Donatello’s sculptures with those of his contemporaries, the joint exhibit shows how he reanimated the classic art and breathed into it an even greater capacity for psychological complexity.
Donatello’s sculptural achievements are on fullest display in the Bargello’s Donatello Room, where the museum has grouped together a variety of sculptural representations of David around Donatello’s 1428 bronze rendition of the biblical hero. When we think of sculptures of David in the city of Florence, we think of Michelangelo’s renowned David in the nearby Galleria dell’Accademia, which Michelangelo fashioned for the Cathedral of Florence between 1501 and 1504. Here again, although a later Renaissance artist’s version would overtake his, it was Donatello’s earlier version, created between 1428-1432 for the Medici’s Florence palace courtyard, that imparted to Michelangelo the revolutionary techniques that would allow him to create his later, more fabulous version of the biblical giant-slayer.
Both Michelangelo and Donatello depict David before he became king — as the young shepherd from Bethlehem who gains the first of multiple stores of glory when he challenges the terrifying Philistine giant Goliath to a duel. But where Michelangelo portrays David as a well-toned Greek athlete with a short-cropped Caesar haircut, Donatello’s David sculpture looks androgynous, or it would if not for the visible genitalia. Indeed, this work was the first freestanding nude statue since Greek and Roman antiquity. Without Donatello’s reintroduction of the classical nude into 15th-century Florence, we may have never had Michelangelo’s more famous rendering of this symbol of Florence. That’s hardly its only significance: This David is also remarkable for its trailblazing use of contrapposto, the technique of being able to convey dynamic weight-shifting in an unmoving statue.
By the time Donatello died in 1466, the Renaissance was well on its way to peaking. Verrocchio, Mantegna, and Pollaiuolo were creating paintings and sculptures in the vein of Donatello’s, and Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo would be soon to follow. These High Renaissance artists may have produced greater paintings and sculptures, but according to Francesco Caglioti, a professor of art history at the Scuola Normale di Pisa and the curator of “Donatello: The Renaissance,” Donatello is “the greatest of all time.” While one can dispute Caglioti’s claim — and I certainly would — one cannot disagree with his and with this exhibit’s contention that Donatello, even more so than Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo, is the most important Renaissance artist, “turning the history of art around by 180 degrees.”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
