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Artists competed for the opportunity (Ghiberti won) Masaccio is regarded as one of the most ____________ of the Early Renaissance painters. Innovative. What did Donatello inspire many artists to do. add expressiveness to public monuments (?)
- Overview
- Early career
Donatello was one of greatest Italian Renaissance artists, noted especially for his sculptures in marble, bronze, and wood. His sculpted figures were some of the first since antiquity to represent anatomy correctly—though some late works were slightly exaggerated—and to suggest a sense of individuality.
What is Donatello known for?
Donatello was a very prolific sculptor whose works included: St. Mark and St. George (c. 1415), two separate sculptures commissioned for the niches of Orasanmichele; David (undated), the first large-scale freestanding nude sculpture since antiquity; the so-called Gattamelata (1447–53), an influential equestrian monument; and St. Mary Magdalene (c. 1450–55).
What was Donatello’s family like?
Donatello was born Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi and was of humble origins: he was the son of Niccolò di Betto Bardi, a Florentine wool carder. Donatello never married or had children.
How was Donatello educated?
Donatello (diminutive of Donato) was the son of Niccolò di Betto Bardi, a Florentine wool carder. It is not known how he began his career, but it seems likely that he learned stone carving from one of the sculptors working for the cathedral of Florence (the Duomo) about 1400. Sometime between 1404 and 1407 he became a member of the workshop of Lorenzo Ghiberti, a sculptor in bronze who in 1402 had won the competition for the doors of the Baptistery. Donatello’s earliest work of which there is certain knowledge, a marble statue of David, shows an artistic debt to Ghiberti, who was then the leading Florentine exponent of International Gothic, a style of graceful, softly curved lines strongly influenced by northern European art. The David, originally intended for the cathedral, was moved in 1416 to the Palazzo Vecchio, the city hall, where it long stood as a civic-patriotic symbol, although from the 16th century on it was eclipsed by the gigantic David of Michelangelo, which served the same purpose. Still partly Gothic in style, other early works of Donatello are the impressive seated marble figure of St. John the Evangelist (1408–15) for the Florence cathedral facade and a wooden crucifix (1406–08) in the church of Santa Croce. The latter, according to an unproved anecdote, was made in friendly competition with Filippo Brunelleschi, a sculptor and a noted architect.
The full power of Donatello first appeared in two marble statues, St. Mark and St. George (both completed c. 1415), for niches on the exterior of Orsanmichele, the church of Florentine guilds (St. George has been replaced by a copy; the original is now in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello). Here, for the first time since Classical antiquity and in striking contrast to medieval art, the human body is rendered as a self-activating functional organism, and the human personality is shown with a confidence in its own worth. The same qualities came increasingly to the fore in a series of five prophet statues that Donatello did beginning in 1416 for the niches of the campanile, the bell tower of the cathedral (all these figures, together with others by lesser masters, were later removed to the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo). The statues were of a beardless and a bearded prophet, as well as a group of Abraham and Isaac (1416–21) for the eastern niches; the so-called Zuccone (“Pumpkin,” because of its bald head); and the so-called Jeremiah (actually Habakkuk) for the western niches. The Zuccone is deservedly famous as the finest of the campanile statues and one of the artist’s masterpieces. In both the Zuccone and the Jeremiah (1427–35), their whole appearance, especially highly individual features inspired by ancient Roman portrait busts, suggests Classical orators of singular expressive force. The statues are so different from the traditional images of Old Testament prophets that by the end of the 15th century they could be mistaken for portrait statues.
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A pictorial tendency in sculpture had begun with Ghiberti’s narrative relief panels for the north door of the Baptistery, in which he extended the apparent depth of the scene by placing boldly rounded foreground figures against more delicately modeled settings of landscape and architecture. Donatello invented his own bold new mode of relief in his marble panel St. George Killing the Dragon (1416–17). Known as schiacciato (“flattened out”), the technique involved extremely shallow carving throughout, which created a far more-striking effect of atmospheric space than before. The sculptor no longer modeled his shapes in the usual way but rather seemed to “paint” them with his chisel.
Donatello continued to explore the possibilities of the new technique in his marble reliefs of the 1420s and early 1430s. The most highly developed of these are The Ascension, with Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter, which is so delicately carved that its full beauty can be seen only in a strongly raking light; and the Feast of Herod (1433–35), with its perspective background. The large stucco roundels with scenes from the life of St. John the Evangelist (about 1434–37), below the dome of the old sacristy of San Lorenzo, Florence, show the same technique but with colour added for better legibility at a distance.
Donatello's signature lifelike and highly emotional works would place him as one of the most influential artists in 15 th century Italy, and an early forefather to the Italian Renaissance.
- Italian
- Florence
From 1443 to 1453, Donatello worked in the northern Italian city of Padua. There he designed a monumental sculpted high altarpiece for the church known as the Santo. Although now dismantled, the overwhelming effect of this sacra conversazione of saints surrounding the Virgin and Child , with narrative scenes set below as on a predella, can ...
Dec 6, 2023 · Donatello, David, bronze, late 1420s to the 1460s, likely the 1440s (Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence); speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. Between 1445 and the mid-1450s, Cosimo de’Medici, the most powerful man in Florence, built his family’s palace on a central thoroughfare in the heart of the city.
