Donatello, the Renaissance Genius on Whose Shoulders Other Geniuses Stand

A gorgeous retrospective in Florence only adds luster to the renown of this epoch-changing artist.

E xpansively — and cheekily — titled, Donatello: The Renaissance is the retrospective of the work of Donato di Niccoló di Betto Bardi (1386–1466), called Donatello. I saw it a couple of weeks ago in Florence, where it unfolds at the Strozzi Palace and the Bargello. The exhibition will happen in different formats and with different catalogues at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, but Donatello is a Florentine. Many of the 140 or so works in the exhibition were made in Florence for Florentines, so the Florence of the Duomo, the Baptistry, and Orsanmichele is still their ambiance.

I’ll write two stories on this extraordinary exhibition and the book that accompanies it. Today I’ll concentrate on the show’s coverage of Donatello from his days as a young man until David Victorious, done in the late 1430s. I’ll write about the exhibition as a scholarly proposition. For Saturday’s story, I’ll write about Donatello’s late career but mostly amble through the galleries. Call it peregrination, or call it an act of love.

For all their renown, the exhibition correctly argues, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael stand on Donatello’s shoulders, and so does the Italian Renaissance. He’s both breach and pivot. His art made tradition look old. Every young artist from Florence to Venice, Rome, and Milan considered Donatello’s the vision to emulate. His David Victorious, from the late 1430s, was, soon after Donatello made it, considered the symbol of Florentine liberty against the odds. It also revived the ancient Greek and Roman heroic nude, for a thousand years itself a symbol of idolatry and indecency.

Donatello and his sometime mentor, sometime collaborator Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) pioneered rational perspective in art. Donatello revived the equestrian monument. He invented the putto. In marble, bronze, and terracotta, he was unorthodox in the extreme, but it wasn’t through force of personality or rich patrons that Donatello made idiosyncrasy the standard. It resonated with a new zeitgeist. What was human and what was divine and supernatural could, and this must have been a thrill, look alike.

Donatello: The Renaissance, at least the Florence show I saw, is the supreme flower of the art of the retrospective. A retrospective is a comprehensive survey of an artist’s work accompanied by a deep dive into old and new scholarship. It doesn’t need to display all of an artist’s hits. Donatello is a case of an artist who made things like tombs that can’t move without divine intervention. The Old Sacristy at the basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence isn’t going anywhere, and neither will Gattamelata gallop from Padua. The catalogue treats these and other projects in detail.

A few years ago, I reviewed the Bruegel retrospective in Vienna. Almost everything that Bruegel painted was there. I reviewed the Tintoretto retrospective in its Venice and Washington, D.C., iterations. The Venice version was, more or less, thorough. What wasn’t in the Accademia or the Doge’s Palace, the two venues, was in Venice, in churches or the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, and visitors were expected, even honor bound, to see them or, if felled by a surfeit of Bellinis, to miss key points. The Washington version had so many holes that it wasn’t a retrospective but a regurgitation of old Tintoretto scholarship. At the Bargello and the Strozzi Palace, almost every Donatello that’s portable is there.

New research, of course, is the reason for a retrospective. The first comprehensive Donatello exhibition was at the Bargello in 1887, marking the 500th anniversary of his birth and, functionally, the debut of art history as we’ve come to know it. The museum gathered as many works attributed to Donatello as it could, and at that point connoisseurship and archival research were so undeveloped that most sculpture considered unusually accomplished and done in Florence before Michelangelo tended to be called a Donatello. The exhibition fashioned mental dotted lines from the art on display at the Bargello to tombs, altarpieces, chapels, and outdoor sculpture in Florence believed to have been touched by Donatello.

It was off to the races. The Bargello show launched the field of Donatello studies. Nearly 150 years later, Donatello: The Renaissance is the sumptuous, magisterial state of play. One of the pleasures, and lessons, of the catalogue involves addition and subtraction. New discoveries happen but, on the topic of Donatello, the course of scholarship has been to reassign work to artists such as Jacopo della Quercia, Nanni di Banco, Nanni di Bartolo, Michelozzo, Verrocchio, Desiderio da Settignano, Ghiberti, and others about whom we know far more from archival research and connoisseurship. An army of art historians has looked at every inch of Donatello. The exhibition summarizes all of these works, object by object.

Early in the catalogue, the curator warmed my heart by forswearing a cult of personality. We have too many monographic exhibitions and books, in part because personalities are more marketable than ideas. The concept of a single genius-as-hero is engrained, too, in art history and in other fields. I’ve known too many idiots and too few geniuses to buy the artist genius-as-hero hook, line, and contrapposto. One of the book’s achievements, and this is the spirit of the entire project, is to establish Donatello as a brilliant, inventive partner in huge projects such as the high altar at the basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua. Where Donatello is to be found is a cause, one of intellectual integrity and fairness, since these big projects involved more than one exceptional artist and usually many.

The exhibition is mostly chronological, considering that Donatello always had multiple projects going, some taking years to finish and most enlisting assistants and partners. Three early works tell us how precocious he was and what a thicket Donatello studies can be. He was born in Florence, the son of an accomplished member of the Arte Della Lana, the wool carders’ guild. As a teenager, he worked for both Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455).

Brunelleschi was the Duomo’s architect. Ghiberti had just won the commission, beating Brunelleschi, to make the bronze doors to Florence’s Baptistry, next to the Duomo. The three would soon become the big beasts of Florentine art.

Donatello’s first bit of radicalism was a small sculpture of a prophet that was part of the Duomo’s Door of the Mandorla, from around 1406. It’s one of the formal entrances to the cathedral. It’s big, and Donatello’s prophet is a tiny part of the program. His isn’t a bearded old man but a teenager, an unprecedented twist on Christian iconography. In 1408, he sculpted his first David Victorious, planned with other life-size single figures for the top of the Duomo’s buttresses.

Against the sky, night or day, these figures would look like sentinels guarding the cathedral. This wasn’t Donatello’s idea but was, in itself, new. Single, freestanding figures independent of a bigger architectural program had never been tried. When Donatello’s David and Nanni di Banco’s Isaiah were hoisted into place, though, they seemed too small to have the desired look of giant sentinels.

This wasn’t Donatello’s fault but, rather, Brunelleschi’s, but no matter. Donatello’s David is in the exhibition. For what the figure lacks in height, it far exceeds in hauteur. He’s a teenager as well, like the prophet in the Door of the Mandorla, with narrow shoulders and outsized hands, but a teen with ’tude, the James Dean of giant-slayers. Hardly a teen you’d see on the street, the figure still has an energy and pose we can sense as human.

A third work, and a failed experiment that’s on Donatello, is a large, painted wood Crucifix, from 1408. Brunelleschi said it looked as if Donatello “had put a peasant on the Cross,” and his Jesus definitely is from the other side of the tracks, bearded, too jowled, with a nose like Jimmy Durante’s, too much a man drawn from riffraff but, still, a man we know.

So we see Donatello the young naturalist, and naturalism was what he sought in reviving the medium of terra-cotta. That Donatello was the father, or resuscitator, of terra-cotta is something new, coming from scholarship over the past 30 or so years and significantly endorsed by Donatello’s curatorial team. There’s a group of terra-cotta Virgin and Child sculptures in the show. Donatello made them in pursuit of an approachable humanity. Most were once painted.

Donatello wasn’t the first to fashion mother and child to look not like a cardboard female figure and a flat little old man. Rather, in using terra-cotta, he deployed three-dimensionality. His mother and baby seem to like being together, too. And his babies wiggle. His mothers caress. Artists throughout northern Italy emulated his terra-cotta Virgin and Child sculptures soon after Donatello started to make them in the 1410s.

I can’t help looking at these early works and not see Donatello as the artist who realized Giotto’s vision of bringing the divine down to earth, of showing us the figures of the Bible who once lived in our realm. In his first monumental bronze, Saint Louis of Toulouse, made between 1418 and 1425, Donatello went the extra mile to make a figure with the observer’s point of view in mind. I don’t know whether or not his passion for accessibility came from the visibility snafu surrounding his early David. I think it’s likely, looking at his work as a whole, that this was a natural priority. Saint Louis was cast in pieces, each piece then finished by hand to create the shadow and depth that Donatello thought was needed to hold the eye.

His Louis is as far from a heroic nude as can be. He’s the most draped saint ever. The dense, variegated folds fascinate rather than intimidate. Saint Louis stands in an architectural niche, but Faith and Hope, bronzes he made for a Sienese baptismal font in the late 1420s, don’t. They’re among the very first freestanding bronze figures in European art since antiquity. Marble’s all well and good, but bronze plays better with light. It’s more dynamic. Gilding gives it sparkle and majesty.

These bronzes lead us directly to David Victorious, from between 1435 and 1440, probably Donatello’s most famous work. Again, as a heroic nude, David was radical, but the patron, Cosimo de’ Medici the Elder, Donatello’s contemporary in age, went for it. He understood that the figure’s adolescent body emphasized that he was the little engine that could, which was one of the themes of David — a metaphor for Florence itself. David, an unknown, even a 98-pound weakling, killed Goliath with a sling and a handful of stones. As an independent city-state, Florence was surrounded by hungry beasts bigger than itself, among them the popes, the Venetians, the French, and the Holy Roman Emperor. David’s strength was unexpected, and his courage never wavered.

Cosimo, though the capo dei capi in Florence, was himself an upstart who won power less through pedigree than from ruthlessness and his riches as one of Europe’s leading bankers. Tradition wasn’t part of his constitution. The nude of antiquity might have been linked in medieval times with idolatry, but Cosimo might have considered himself as casting a whiff of the pagan, too. David, more than incidentally, lived not in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence’s main public square, but in the courtyard of the Medici Palace, proposing that Cosimo and the state, via its icon, were now one.

Both the bronze David and Donatello’s biggest crowd-pleaser, Saint George, from 1415–17, are on view at the Bargello. Splitting an exhibition between two venues can kill it, but here there wasn’t a choice. The Strozzi Palace is a modern museum, and eleven of Donatello’s 14 sections are there. For linear narrative, it’s best to start at the Strozzi Palace. Its galleries have modern-museum production values. The objects, set against grayed-down blue walls, look fantastic. The Bargello was once a fortified tower and prison. It’s a different experience.

The Bargello could have sent David and Saint George to the Strozzi Palace, but then no one would go to the Bargello. These are the Bargello’s two stars, estimable place that it is. And let’s face it, the Bargello did the 1887 retrospective and owns Donatello. From the Strozzi Palace to the Bargello is a 15-minute walk. After seeing 100 or so objects at the Strozzi, I think even those of us with the endurance of a Marine would need a break to reflect, and I’m not a Marine. And both iconic Donatellos look far better at the Bargello than they would at the Strozzi Palace.

Donatello’s earlier David is a dress rehearsal for Saint George. George isn’t a teenager but a man and an earnest, intent warrior. I think it’s important to see the sculpture more or less at the height Donatello intended, about six feet off the ground, and in the copy of its original Gothic niche, which abets George’s gaze — by containing the figure, the niche condenses his energy. David once stood on a column, too, about six feet tall. Today, its base is three feet. The catalogue argues that this enfeebles the figure. Set higher, a teen anatomy flowers into ennoblement, his downward gaze gaining authority. Seen from a height of three feet, David seems almost shy, the book argues. It might push the point.

Looking at the two sculptures after a refreshing walk and lunch, I decided that Donatello was the master of youth and energy. Some artists specialize in suffering, some in pomp, some in fancy, some in warm and cozy. At the beginning of this piece, I called the show’s title “expansive and cheeky,” two ingredients in the recipe that makes people young.

On Saturday, expect to see lots of spiritelli, or putti, though they’re also called cherubs, as well as the Donatello who feels and looks modern. I’m referring to Donatello’s stiacciato marble reliefs, sublime and ethereal. They’ll absorb all but the most reptilian, jackassity viewers into rapture.