Donatello isn't an artist, he's a universe: unravelling the mystery of a Renaissance man
“Donatello isn’t an artist,” says Arturo Galansino, the director of Florence’s Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. “He’s a universe.” We’ve met for a quick “doppio” in a piazza beside the palace, before heading in to see its substantial new show about the Florentine Renaissance sculptor, who died in the city, aged almost 80, in 1466. Next year, a modified version of the exhibition will arrive in London, at the V&A, following a stint in Berlin.
Why, then, does Galansino believe that Donatello, as it were, contained multitudes? Because, he replies, his long life straddled eras. He emerged, after training in a goldsmith’s workshop, in a world we call “Late Gothic”, but died, having rediscovered classical antiquity and worked throughout the Italian peninsula, during the Renaissance – which he, and his close friend, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, ushered in. The 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari couldn’t decide to which age Donatello belonged.
Moreover, because he lived well into his seventies, much of his work, despite his illiteracy, is documented – thankfully, because it’s so stylistically, and materially, diverse. As Galansino puts it: “He looks like 10 different artists.” Over the centuries, there has been considerable confusion about what’s by him.
Surprisingly, for such an important figure, there haven’t been many exhibitions in his honour – perhaps because painting is typically more popular (and portable) than sculpture. The new show, though, the largest yet, is meant, finally, to give Donatello his due, reminding us of his versatile originality.
With more than 130 artworks, including international loans such as Boston’s Madonna of the Clouds (so delicate it seems as if the marble, like sugar, would dissolve in water), the exhibition is arranged in 14 sections across two venues: the Strozzi, and the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, where, upstairs in the so-called Salone di Donatello, several of his most famous sculptures are on permanent display: his ardent marble St George, ready for action balanced on the balls of his feet; the grave-faced, heraldic Marzocco, the city’s leonine symbol carved from “macigno” sandstone; and his bronze David, the first known freestanding monumental nude since antiquity.
The sensuous effeminacy of the latter, hip-cocking hero, whose camp, contrapposto pose derives from Praxiteles, is always startling: naked except for his odd, garlanded hat and fashionista’s knee-high, tasselled boots, his glossy, youthful form is set off by both the notched, monstrous blade in his right hand and Goliath’s haggard head beneath one foot. For the exhibition, though, he has been elevated, to approximate the height at which Donatello meant him to be seen, which provides, I suppose, a smidge more heroic heft.
Inside the Strozzi, where the exhibition starts with another, earlier and blander victorious David (this time carved from marble, and the ancestor of Michelangelo’s), things proceed conventionally, against walls coloured Medici blue. A room of tender, devotional representations of the Virgin and Child – those by Donatello imbued with a brilliant new air of spontaneous informality and nuzzling affection – dramatises his rejuvenation of the medium of terracotta; another introduces us to his exceptionally shallow reliefs, which Vasari called “stiacciato” (flattened-out), into which Donatello could squeeze an astonishing amount.
In one example, a newly restored gilded bronze panel known as the Feast of Herod, the Baptist’s head is served upon a platter, appalling the king’s guests. Illustrated in all the textbooks, it has been moved from a baptismal font in Siena for the first time in 600 years.
A later section focuses on Donatello’s lively, so-called “spiritelli”: mischievous, pudgy, putti-like creatures, neither fully pagan nor angelic, such as the wholly bizarre Attis-Amorino, who has a tiny tail poking out beneath a broad belt decorated with poppies. Wearing a pair of open trousers that would fit in at a hedonistic Berlin nightclub, he dances, arms aloft, like a hippy. “For sure,” Galansino tells me, “he’s high.”
The Strozzi show concludes with Donatello, who was proud of being working-class, supported in old age by Cosimo de’ Medici. The Bargello then examines his impact, demonstrating the influence of the Dudley Madonna, a minimalist, pocket-sized marble relief now in the V&A, on various masters, including Leonardo, Perugino, Michelangelo, and, almost 150 years later, Artemisia Gentileschi.
When this scholarly show comes to London, I only hope that the wall texts will be tweaked, because, here, they have a musing, donnish quality, full of tweedy phrases such as “plastic masses” and “limpid purity”. Perhaps something was lost in translation – unlike, thankfully, the many relatable qualities that still make Donatello great.
From March 19 until July 31; information: palazzostrozzi.org