DONATELLO (Donato di Niccolò de' Bardi). - Sculptor, b. in Florence in 1386, d. there in 1466. Alongside Brunelleschi, architect, and Masaccio, painter, he is the creator of the new artistic humanity of the early Renaissance. An apprentice in Ghiberti's workshop from 1403 to 1407, then a work companion of Nanni di Banco, D. was formed in a profoundly Gothic environment, though fertile in talents and already stirred by tremors of renewal. His first efforts (the right Prophet of the door of the "mandorla" in the cathedral of Florence and its "pendant" in Paris [1406-1408], the marble David in the Bargello [1409], the St. Mark of Orsanmichele [1411], the St. John the Evangelist in the Cathedral [1413-15], etc.) clearly show the marks of the ingenious effort to free from traditional Gothic stylistic conventions the vision of a heroic and feverishly vital humanity: some reference to the antique has no meaning of humanistic nostalgia, but of a return to the sources of the freshest expressive immediacy. This formative phase is closed by the St. George of Orsanmichele (in the Bargello), where the Gothic serpentine of the line has been translated into the utterly new utterance of that forward-surging spiral of the mantle which, impressing upon the figure an intense energy of sudden movement, blocks its motion by anchoring it to a clear spatial cubature. But it is a momentary equilibrium, almost achieved on a razor's edge, which immediately afterward, in the statues of the campanile (from 1415 to 1430 and beyond) and in other contemporary works, D. attains effects of great dramatic intensity, hollowing out and corroding the surfaces, in a vision of intense human depth.
Meanwhile in the statuettes and in the relief executed for the baptismal font of Siena (1423-29), in the Assumption of the Brancacci monument in Naples (1427), in the bronze statues of the David and the Love-Attis in the Bargello, in the pulpit of Prato (1428-38), and in the cantoria of the Florentine cathedral (1433-39), light becomes the protagonist of the style, now articulating perspective with its gleams, now modeling the plasticity of the nude, and always transfiguring the naturalistic or classicistic elements (a journey by D. to Rome in 1433 is documented) into an expression of great spiritual depth, always differently accented, now on the melancholy and pensive, now on the dramatic, now on the exaltation of an unbridled vitality (slightly clouded at times by the collaboration of Michelozzo). The bronze doors and the terracotta roundels of the old sacristy of S. Lorenzo are among the highest achievements of this Donatellian "expressionism" which dissolves every corporeality into a concordant vibration of lines and light and every spatial definition into the hyperbole of a marvelous perspectival illusionism. From 1443 D. was in Padua, where in the statues and especially in the bas-reliefs of the altar of the Santo he attains, through a most fluid and wholly impetuous luminism, accents of intense tragic quality. Even the equestrian monument to Gattamelata (1447-53), even in its apparent serenity and its inspiration from the Roman Marcus Aurelius, rests stylistically on a most precarious equilibrium; it is a structure of pressing rhythms, of surfaces quivering in the light, eroded and hollowed out, held together by a line wholly in tension.
In the works executed by D. after his return to Florence in 1453 - the Magdalene of the Baptistery, the group of Judith and Holofernes in the Palazzo Vecchio, the St. John the Baptist of the cathedral of Siena, the two wooden pulpits, executed with extensive collaboration of pupils, in S. Lorenzo - there is still, and more concentrated and turned inward, the dramatic luminism affirmed in the Paduan works. So that, as has been said, Florentine society, which by then was maturing the serenely humanistic ideals of what would be the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent, had to read in these extreme works of the great master a severe warning, almost a "memento mori."
D.'s artistic path is among the most complex and the most difficult to define in a formula: and one can only say, in conclusion, that the exceptional fervor of his genius, anxious for continual surpassing, ended up destroying its own conquests, standing at one and the same time as founder and subverter, at least in potential, of one and the same great civilization: that of the fifteenth-century Renaissance. - See plates CXIII-CXIV.
