DONATELLO (DONATO di NICCOLÒ de' BARDI). — Sculptor, born in Florence in 1386, died there in 1466. Alongside Brunelleschi, the architect, and Masaccio, the 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 collaborator with Nanni di Banco, Donatello matured in an environment deeply rooted in the Gothic tradition, though fertile in talent and already stirred by stirrings of renewal. His earliest works (the right-hand Prophet of the *Porta della Mandorla* in Florence Cathedral and its counterpart in Paris [1406–1408], the marble *David* in the Bargello [1409], *St Mark* at Orsanmichele [1411], *St John the Evangelist* in the Cathedral [1413–15], etc.) clearly bear the marks of his genius as he strove to free traditional forms from the stylistic constraints of an heroic humanity.
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e febbrimente vitale: some reference to the antique carries no meaning of humanistic nostalgia, but rather a return to the sources of the freshest expressive immediacy. This phase of formation culminates in the St. George at Orsanmichele (now in the Bargello), where the Gothic serpentine line has been translated into the most novel word of that adventurous spiral of the mantle which, impressing upon the figure an intense energy of spring, anchors its movement by fixing it within a clear spatial cubature. Yet this is a momentary equilibrium, almost achieved on a razor’s edge, for soon after, in the statues of the bell tower (from 1415 to 1430 and beyond) and in other contemporary works, Donatello achieves effects of great dramatic force, excavating and corroding surfaces in a vision of intense human depth.
Meanwhile, in the statuettes and reliefs executed for the baptismal font of Siena (1423–29), in the Assumption of the Brancacci monument in Naples (1427), in the bronze statues of David and Amor-Attis at the Bargello, in the pulpit of Prato (1428–38), and in the cantoria of the Florence cathedral (1433–39), light becomes the protagonist of the style, now marking the perspective with its flashes, now modeling the plasticity of the nude, and always transfiguring naturalistic or classicizing elements (a journey by Donatello to Rome in 1433 is documented) into an expression of profound spiritual depth, ever diversely accented—now melancholic and pensive, now dramatic, now exalting unrestrained vitality (slightly dimmed at times by the collaboration of Michelozzo). The bronze doors and terracotta roundels of the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo rank among the highest achievements of this “expressionism” of Donatello’s, which dissolves every corporeality into a harmonious vibration of lines and light and every spatial definition into the hyperbole of wondrous illusionistic perspective. From 1443, Donatello is 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 impetuous luminism, accents of intense tragic force. Even the equestrian monument to Gattamelata (1447–53),
though seemingly serene and inspired by the Roman Marcus Aurelius, is stylistically sustained by a precariously balanced equilibrium; it is a composition of relentless rhythms, of surfaces trembling in the light, eroded and hollowed out, held together by a line stretched to the utmost tension.
In the works executed after Donatello’s return to Florence in 1453—the Magdalene of the Baptistery, the group of Judith and Holofernes in Palazzo Vecchio, the St. John the Baptist of the Siena cathedral, the two wooden pulpits, executed with extensive collaboration from pupils, in San Lorenzo—there persists, and more intently and profoundly, the dramatic luminism established in the Paduan works. Thus, as has been observed, the Florentine society, which was by then maturing the serenely humanistic ideals of what would become the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent, could read in these final works of the great master a stern admonition, almost a *memento mori*.
Donatello’s artistic journey is one of the most complex and difficult to define in a single formula; and one can only conclude that the exceptional fervor of his genius, ever striving for continual surpassing, ended by destroying its own achievements even as it simultaneously founded and, at least potentially, subverted a great civilization: that of the fifteenth-century Renaissance. — Vedi tavv. CXIII–CXIV.