Another Look at Renaissance Polymath Donatello

Whether sculpting putti, naughty or nice, or making perspective work, he’s all about innovation.

E arlier this week, I wrote about Donatello: The Renaissance, the retrospective of the work of Donato di Niccoló di Betto Bardi (1386–1466). Donatello was an aesthetic adventurist. He’s voracious like Picasso, and nearly as long-lived. At a time with a lust for new thinking, he served invention after invention. He refined theories of linear perspective so every artist could use them. He revived the dormant art of terra-cotta. He was a symbol maker, too. His David Victorious, from the late 1430s, a bronze of the young David standing by Goliath’s dead head, became Florence’s calling card, the ultimate little engine that could.

Through his sculptures of David and Saint George and his terra-cotta sculptures of the Virgin and Child, he expressed a new cult of youth. Yes, he depicted lots of gnarly old prophets, but, overall, Donatello is all about what was fresh and pulsing with life and energy. The exhibition first develops this overarching theme through objects such as his first David Victorious, evoking sass and a sense of destiny, a painted wood sculpture from 1408 of Jesus on the Cross looking like a truck driver, Saint George, from around 1415, and lifelike terra-cotta takes on the Virgin and Child where the Virgin actually looks like an attentive, loving young mother, and the baby fidgets and reaches like a real baby.

Then there are the spiritelli. Naked winged children — called putti or cherubs today but called spiritelli then — were aplenty on old Roman sarcophagi, but Gothic taste found them too pagan, and, in any event, babies, unless they were Jesus or John the Baptist, were empty vessels as likely to be filled with evil by Satan as propelled to goodness. Donatello was in Rome in 1432 and 1433 and saw lots of ancient Roman art. Before long, spiritelli were everywhere.

Spiritelli dancing in a frenzy first appear in the grand pulpit Donatello designed and sculpted with Michelozzo in the early 1430s. For the next 30 years, Donatello gives us spiritello after spiritello. It’s a handy design element. The little imps are fun and attractive. They don’t represent divinities with narratives, so they’re iconography-free. They extend the artist’s and his age’s emphasis on youth, energy, and new possibility. Some, like Two Spiritelli Candelabra-Holders, bronzes from around 1437, are ebullient little teases. They held the candles illuminating the Duomo’s organ for the organist. They’re in a church but they look secular.

Attis-Amorino, from the late 1430s, is a bronze, winged child, not a toddler, life-size, wearing only trousers tailored to leave his genitals fully exposed. He smiles, gestures with both hands, and treads on a snake. He might be Eros, or a young Hercules or Bacchus. The art historian Erwin Panofsky, who specialized in Renaissance iconography, said the figure represents “the passage of time.” I tend to accept Panofsky as a truth-speaker, but this seems evasive. There’s something dirty going on, and Panofsky can’t bring himself to admit it.

Disney Groomer Club, I can hear you panting all the way in Vermont.

For the exhibition, Donatello’s spiritelli are leaveners. They show his variousness. I don’t like children — squirmy, demanding, and germy as they are — and the Gothics were on to something in finding them prone to treachery, but they’re great fun.

Aside from featuring baby Jesus here and there, Donatello’s stiacciato marble sculptures aren’t profoundly connected to the spiritelli. They’re a separate genre and among the most beguiling, unearthly works of art I’ve seen. About half a dozen are in the exhibition, among them the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Dudley Madonna, from 1440. The Renaissance painter and historian Georgio Vasari called them a “low, stiacciato” relief, which seems redundant, but it isn’t. Most of the carving is bas-relief, or a low projection with no undercutting to give volume. Some of the carving is so subtle that the motifs seem squashed, even etched. Donatello’s are either wall sculpture and human scale — the Pazzi Madonna, illustrating the cover of the catalogue, is about 30 inches square — or, like the Dudley Madonna, 10 by 6 inches, tiny, and for personal and private contemplation.

The marble predella, or base, for Donatello’s Saint George, from 1415–17, is the first time he worked in low relief. Set below the life-size saint, it’s very much a supporting player and usually missed by viewers. It’s beautiful, to be sure, and an early case of Donatello’s deployment of Alberti’s theories about linear perspective to create the illusion of space. More important for Western art going forward, Donatello developed a mathematical formula that uses architectural elements in a scene, in the predella’s case background arches and an outcropping of rocks, to regulate the size of human figures so everything seems real.

One of the few quibbles I have with Donatello: The Renaissance is the absence of a close look at Donatello and perspective. Math’s hard, I know, but his use of linear perspective was revolutionary. It governed how he composed figures, especially his marble reliefs but also his bronzes, and shows how he fashioned his sculptures to look their best given where they were to be located. This is something a university art museum would do, but it’s essential to Donatello studies, missing from the exhibition, and not given the ink it deserves in the book.

Back to Donatello’s reliefs. The Pazzi Madonna, from 1422, is so moving, so riveting, because it’s so natural. This is, in part, a matter of proportional exactness, but the figures are flat enough that they look abstracted, as if the earthly and the heavenly merge. Ghiberti’s bronze doors for the Florence Baptistry use low relief to great effect, but Donatello’s using white marble. Light plays with bronze to create depth and drama but, in marble, Donatello’s images look like they’re dissolving into the mist. That the scene is present yet distant makes for pathos and inscrutability.

Some of these reliefs, like the Madonna of the Clouds, from the late 1420s, from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, are multi-figured and complex. The Feast of Herod, from 1435, which belongs to the MFA in Lille, is cinematic, with at least 20 figures, a staircase, arches, and a colonnade. The Dudley Madonna, though, is the most magical. Its carving is the most shallow. The composition is simple, with the Virgin sitting on a cube while the baby clings to her. The book calls the Virgin’s costume “an exhaustible school of drapery.” She’s grand, but both figures are distant. The exhibition dates it to 1440. Though it is the size of a book and was in Cosimo de’ Medici’s private library as one of his most precious possessions, it became famous soon after Donatello made it.

I have only one or two other quibbles with the exhibition. The comparisons are instructive, some more than others. Vasari tells us that Brunelleschi said Donatello’s Jesus in a carved wood Crucifix, from around 1408, “looked like a peasant,” and Brunelleschi didn’t mean to praise. Jesus’s body, he said, was both delicate and perfect. Donatello, though Brunelleschi’s protégé, seemed to value resonance too much. Who would want to pray before a man-on-the-street? Brunelleschi’s life-size Crucifix, from 1410, wasn’t an explicit retort, but I agree that lurking behind the scenes was a jab. “This is how it’s done,” Brunelleschi might have said to Donatello over a Campari and tonic. His Jesus isn’t a bruised and battered soccer player or, worse, a grungy soccer hooligan, but a Jesus who’s both lithe and emaciated, ethereal but real.

The comparison is a story of youthful prowess and mentorship as well as a sign of the experimental fever in Florence. Brunelleschi, architect of the Duomo and the maker of high establishment taste in Florence, had carved Jesus as a nude. His loincloth was of will–o’–the–wisp weight and density. Though Brunelleschi was a few years older than Donatello, the two played off each other.

I’m all for looking at Donatello’s inspiration, but sometimes it’s pushed too far. Andrea del Castagno’s Apparition of the Trinity to Saint Jerome, from around 1453, portrays a wildly foreshortened aerial Jesus on the Cross looking like a plane landing in front of the viewer. This and Fra Angelico’s lovely Naming of Saint John the Baptist are direct applications, in painting, of Donatello’s perspective system. Andrea Mantegna’s Virgin and Child, from the early 1490s, is nice to see, but this picture and Virgin and Child paintings by Marco Zoppo, Liberale da Verona, Giovanni da Pisa, and others aren’t necessary and are, instead, distractions. Yes, Donatello’s terra-cottas were new and influential, but that’s a point that wall text and one or two direct comparables can make.

Later heavy hitters such as Leonardo, Jacopo Sansovino, Pedro Berruguete, and Bronzino were omnivorous, as was Donatello. They looked at Donatello’s work, and I know the exhibition posits that Donatello hovered over the entire Italian Renaissance. It doesn’t so much overreach as rush us through the 16th century. It may’ve worked better as a separate exhibition or three or four focused shows.

Why the show ends with Artemisia Gentileschi is beyond me. Her Virgin and Child, from the late 1610s, is insipid, might not even be by her, and isn’t even an execution picture! The book concedes that the picture “fails to reveal close borrowings from Donatello.” It doesn’t try hard to banish the obvious point someone made: troppi branchi morti. Too many dead white men. Must she be everywhere? Is Rocky VII: Artemisia in the Ring next?

There are so many other fantastic works of art in the exhibition. Gattamelata, Donatello’s life-size equestrian bronze of a Paduan condottiere from 1453, is huge and in Padua’s main square, but the Carafa Head, from 1453, is there. It was slated for an equestrian sculpture in Naples that Donatello never finished. The artist’s Saint John the Baptist, from the late 1450s, reworked in 1465, is a very late bronze made for a Sienese church. John the Baptist was as bedraggled, even troubled, as the young David was coolly triumphant, so the look of this late work and David Victorious from the late 1430s couldn’t be more different. Like his Saint Louis of Toulouse, c. 1418–25, it was cast in pieces so Donatello could manipulate the look of John’s face, skin, and dress.

Donatello and many other artists worked on San Lorenzo’s Old Sacristy from the 1420s until around 1442. The chapel architecture isn’t going anywhere, but the bronze doors could and did travel, leaving the sacristy for the first time in 600 years. Each door has ten panels, and each panel two saints in animated conversation. Together they’re an encyclopedia of poses and very rich.

Donatello: The Renaissance is going to the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and then the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I don’t know whether the Bargello will lend Saint George or David Victorious. The curator of the Florence show says each of the other venues will have its own take and its own catalogue. There’s no dearth of 15th-century Italian art in either city, so if the show loses its two sculptural superstars but almost everything else travels, audiences in London and Berlin will have a treat.