Donatello

Donatello, born Donato di Niccolò di Betto di Bardo (b. c. 1386–d. 1466) in Florence, was one of the most gifted and versatile sculptors working on the Italian peninsula during the Quattrocento. Reflecting his career, the scholarship on Donatello is vast and varied, and nearly all aspects of his life and works have received sustained attention. Though he trained in bronze casting and, apparently, in goldsmithery, his first documented works were in marble. From c. 1406 to 1440 he carved marble sculptures for Florence Cathedral and its Campanile. During the first three decades of the fifteenth century he fashioned statues for the exterior of the Florentine guild church of Orsanmichele (Sts. Mark, George, and Louis of Toulouse), as well as a variety of sculptures elsewhere. In the 1420s and 1430s he worked in Siena, carrying out a relief and statues for the font of the Baptistery and a tomb slab for Giovanni Pecci (Cathedral). Alongside Michelozzo, with whom he maintained a legal partnership (c. 1425–1434), he completed in the 1420s other tombs—one for Baldassare Cossa (the antipope John XXIII) in the Florence Baptistery and another for Rainaldo Brancacci in Sant’Angelo a Nilo in Naples—and, in the 1430s, a pulpit for Prato Cathedral. He spent two years in Rome—1432–1433—and made a number of sculptures there; he also worked for patrons in Mantua, Ferrara, and Modena. Though inspired by ancient and medieval art, Donatello was a relentlessly innovative sculptor whose approach was often experimental. He invented the schiacciato relief, demonstrating painterly effects in sculpture; he participated in the reinvention of the bronze statuette; and he was one of the first to fashion, after Antiquity, life-sized, freestanding statues. Examples include his extensively studied bronze David and Judith and Holofernes, both of which, along with relief sculptures at the church of San Lorenzo, he made for the Medici family, his enthusiastic patrons. From c. 1443 to 1453 he resided in Padua, where he made sculptures for the interior of the Basilica of Sant’Antonio, as well as the equestrian portrait of Gattamelata. He worked in Siena from 1457 to 1459 before returning to Florence, where he died. He utilized a wide range of media: stone of all types, metal (gilded and ungilded bronze), glass, fiber, wax, ceramic, polychromed wood (e.g., the St. John the Baptist in Venice; his haunting Mary Magdelene), terracotta, and stucco—the latter two used to craft inventive reliefs of the Virgin and Christ Child. He was especially attentive to the treatment of surface and often painted, carved, or scratched materials so they resembled other substances. Near-contemporary sources describe him as sarcastic, witty, and clever.

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