by Paul Johnson
Donatello’s technical accomplishments were spectacular. He could work in anything: stucco, wax, finished bronze (though he did not do his own casting), clay, marble, every kind of stone from the softest to the hardest, glass and wood. He used paint and gilt when he wished. He did not follow the rules of any particular technique but improvised when he wanted and used anything that came to hand to achieve new effects. To create the Madonna dei Cordai (Florence, Museo Bardini) he carved the Madonna and Child out of wood like a jigsaw, covered it in setting material, placed it on a flat background over which he put a mosaic of gilt leather, then painted everything, with a final layer of varnish to bind it together. This artistic technique of sucking in materials to suit specific purposes as the creative mind arbitrarily chooses is what the French were later—nearly half a millennium later—to call bricolage. Such spontaneity was staggering in the first half of the fifteenth century. But Donatello was also capable of a carefully planned and deliberate extension of the frontiers of existing techniques: he invented, for instance, a delicate form of low-relief carving, rilievo schiacciato, which is not far from drawing. Slow and conscientious he was when required, but few artists moved more easily and confidently among their materials.
Hence his constant originality. He was always doing things that had not been done before. Even before him, artists were moving away from the collectivist presentation of human beings that was so characteristic of medieval art, portraying them as individuals even in the high relief of bronze or stone, and then going further and picking them out of the background into singular prominence. But it was Donatello who, as it were, once and for all, put individual humans on their own feet, as they had stood in ancient times, as separate statues. This involved a good deal of technical innovation, for instance to prevent statues from falling over and—a typical Renaissance touch, this—the application of scientific principles to visual presentation. Here are a dozen ways in which Donatello innovated.
First, his earliest masterpiece, St. John the Evangelist, begun in 1410, for the great western portal of Florence Cathedral (now in the Duomo Museum), was worked with deliberately distorted proportions so that, seen directly in photos, it looks unstable and overelongated, but when you get underneath it, to the position from which Donatello designed it to be seen, it looks overwhelmingly solid and powerful. No one had done this before so convincingly. Second, Donatello used ancient patterns to give weight and authority to his statues, an early example, 1411–13, being his marble St. Mark in the Drapers’ niche on Orsanmichele, Florence, a truly Renaissance figure compared to Ghiberti’s work, which still looks medieval.
Third, he made a statue live: thus the humanity of St. George, carved in stone for the Guild of Armorers’ niche on Orsanmichele (now in the Bargello), seems to come through the armor—his face and hands are alive, and he balances himself on the balls of his feet. As Vasari later observed, “There is a wonderful suggestion of life bursting out of the stone.” Fourth, with the assistance of Michelozzo, an expert at casting, Donatello gave an object lesson in the potentialities of bronze with a St. Louis of Toulouse (1418–22, now in the Museo dell’Opera di Santa Croce, Florence), with the mitre, gloves and crozier cast separately and the magnificent cope cast in different sections, allowing the sculptor to display his virtuosity to the full. The same kind of innovation emerges in his Jeremiah and Habakkuk done for Giotto’s Campanile (1423ff., Museo dell’Opera del Duomo), which use experimental techniques to suit the settings and produce strikingly lively prophets, whom Donatello might have observed in the streets below. Liveliness is also the secret of a sixth innovation, a revival of the Roman bust, which he combined with the medieval practice of putting heads on containers for facial relics. But Donatello’s heads appear to be of living men, even when they are done from death masks. An exceptionally fine one is the terra-cotta bust of Niccolò da Uzzano (Bargello), one of the earliest true portraits in the history of European art, yet another innovation.
An eighth innovation was the first “humanist” tomb, of the antipope John XXIII, done for the Florence Baptistry some time after 1419. The effigy was cast, then gilded, and is an integral part of an architectural setting, with a bier, sarcophagus, sorrowing Virgin and other accessories (Michelozzo being the coartist), an ensemble that became the pattern for many more, right up to the end of the eighteenth century, in Canova’s prime. Donatello used complex decorative surrounds for the first time, for narrative reliefs in his new rilievo schiacciato, as in the beautiful Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum). A tenth innovation, here and elsewhere, is the use of a new kind of aerial perspective. Sometimes he employed stratified marble for clouds. Sometimes he placed ruler and set square in damp stucco, then cut back the material with a spatula to suggest receding planes. The Feast of Herod, made for the font in the Siena Cathedral baptistry, is another excellent example of the way Donatello used architecture to offset low relief, and vice versa, as in the Singing Gallery of Florence Cathedral, an ecstatic dance of the souls of the innocent in Paradise.
Donatello was always discovering new forms of art and illuminating them with new tricks of the trade (as he would put it). Thus the four evangelists in roundels in the old sacristy of San Lorenzo, Florence, are real, lifelike old men, not prototypical saints. Equally innovative are the four roundels that deal with the life of St. John the Evangelist, many of the figures in which are shown only in part, cut off by the frame of the roundel to give immediacy and impact, as if the roundel were a window through which we look into a living scene. No one had thought of this device before. Donatello was above all a realist: his bronze panel that he did for Cosimo de’ Medici of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence is so horrifying in describing the saint’s death agony that this and its companion New Testament scenes may have been too strong for the taste of the time and were not installed in San Lorenzo until the sixteenth century. Equally horrifying, in its own way, was the wooden statue of St. Mary Magdalen in her hideous old age, which may have been the sculptor’s last work (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo) and the great bronze of St. John the Baptist, still in its place in Siena Cathedral. Nothing like these dramatic and tragic works had ever been produced before. Yet the bronze of David that many would consider Donatello’s finest work—it is certainly the best loved—and that originally stood in the center courtyard of the new Medici palace (it is now in the Bargello) is a work of fantastic imagination rather than realism. David is naked and with his long hair and broad-brimmed hat is as beautiful as a girl, but is also a startlingly real youth: the audacity of the concept is shocking, exciting and suggestive, and one wonders what even the educated Florentine elite thought of it when it was first unveiled. But Donatello, then as always, did not care: he was serving his art and his God in the way that his genius—not society or any other authority—dictated.
In the age of Donatello, highly gifted but still lesser artists tended to be overshadowed. But they were not overwhelmed, for by the early fifteenth century the art market in Italy was vast, and the cleverer ones looked carefully at his work to see what they could steal or, better, build upon into innovations of their own. Luca Della Robbia (c. 1399–1482), a younger Florentine contemporary, who then got the commission for the great Singing Gallery in marble of the Florentine Cathedral organ loft, was an artist who studied the antique as closely as Donatello but who also liked to revive medieval imagery and effects when it suited him. His marble carving is exquisite in its way, but he was quick to seize on Donatello’s revival of terra-cotta as a material with huge commercial-artistic possibilities. In the 1430s he invented a tin-based glaze for terra-cotta, one of the great artistic discoveries of the period, indeed of all time. These powerful glazes both protect and intensify the colors, give the figures under them depth and luminosity, and bring out the beauty of the forms, making them significant and touching. The first work in this manner of which we have clear documentation dates from 1441, but glazed terra-cotta quickly became fashionable, partly because
it was so immediately attractive, partly because it was comparatively cheap.
Luca Della Robbia set up a highly productive workshop with his nephew Andrea, and was soon exporting specimens over most of Europe. They could be taken to bits and reassembled, and so were easily transported, and they served not just as works of art in themselves, to decorate a studiolo or bedroom or dining hall, but as elegant yet utilitarian objects in churches—tabernacles, holy-water stoups, reliquaries and stations of the cross. They could be also used for grander purposes, such as major altarpieces, as well as roundels and ceiling bosses. Luca Della Robbia was a delightful and charming artist rather than a great one, but his power to penetrate the European art market of his day was huge and his influence therefore significant—he brought the Renaissance to many households below the princely level all over northern as well as southern Europe, and he had many imitators.
Nevertheless, in Italy at any rate the lead went increasingly to sculptors who aimed much higher, and especially to those who could produce the independent standing figure or, better still, the man on horseback. Halfway between the two sculptural giants Donatello and Michelangelo stands Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–88), yet another Florentine. His father was a brickmaker, perhaps a decorative one, and he was associated from an early age with the goldsmiths who, in Florence particularly, provided the skilled and experimental environment from which so many great artists came. It is important to remember that most of the visually creative Renaissance leaders were artists in the widest sense: they could and often did turn their hands to architecture as well as painting and sculpture, to designs for almost any kind of artifact that required exceptional skill—to anything, in fact, for which there was or could be a market. If Verrocchio began as a goldsmith, he quickly turned to sculpture as well, competing for major commissions, and became involved in a number of different metal projects, such as creating the giant copper ball for the lantern of Florence Cathedral. When he was senior enough to run a workshop of his own, which was also a retail shop where clients could come to buy, order copies or commission works of their choosing, he and his assistants worked in virtually all media and materials, from jewelry to massive bronzes and marbles, as well as monumental paintings. His range and versatility—and enterprise—were reasons why so many talented young men, like Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino and Lorenzo di Credi, to list only the most celebrated, came to learn under his direction. Indeed, so successful was his shop that he opened another one in Venice.
Florentine artists, especially sculptors and painters, were highly competitive, and were encouraged to be so by their patrons, both municipal and private. Verrocchio was among the most competitive of all, both with other workshops, like that run by the Pollaiuolo brothers, and with individual artists, living or dead. His Boy with a Dolphin (Palazzo Vecchio, Florence) was an attempt to take over and surpass a favorite theme of antiquity, and a highly successful one. His David (Bargello) was a deliberate challenge to the youthful charm of the marvelous Donatello statue, and may well have been more popular in its day, for it is far more virile, and the detail is superb. His masterpiece, on which he spent much of the last decade of his life, was also an effort to surpass Donatello. Mounted figures, cast in bronze, life-size or larger, were regarded as one of the greatest achievements of antiquity. The four antique horses on St. Mark’s in Venice, stolen from Constantinople, were reminders of how difficult it was to sculpt and cast even unmounted equine statues. One of Donatello’s greatest achievements, in the decade 1445–55, was successfully to create a mounted figure, the Gattamelata, in front of the great church of St. Anthony in Padua. Verrocchio now outdid this, with his magnificent rendering of the mounted warlord Bartolomeo Colleoni, erected at one of the most prominent sites in Venice, just outside the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Technically it is a masterwork. Aesthetically, it is formidable, bringing out the terrifying brutality of the men who conducted warfare in the Renaissance. Indeed, it has some claims to be the most successful, as well as the best known, of all mounted statues, and helps one to understand how Verrocchio contrived to extract such huge prices (up to 350 florins) from his patrons.
One can probably learn more about Renaissance art from a detailed study of this industrious man’s shops than from any other single institution. Behind the actual output were the preparatory drawings, the models or bozzetti in wax and clay, which were shown to clients to indicate what they could expect for their money, and the more finished modelli in terra-cotta. The shop and its back studios and outhouses were full of equipment of every kind, including plaster models of actual heads, arms, hands, feet and knees, which Verrocchio had made by a secret process of his own. These were used by himself and his assistants for sculpture and painting alike. He kept racks of drawings of male and female heads and made clay models of figures, draped with rags dipped in plaster, for use in sculpting or painting drapery, a practice adopted by Leonardo and others who worked under him. Knowledge of the Verrocchio studio takes us behind the scenes of Renaissance art and shows how its high standards were based on intense discipline, careful preparation and a ruthless use of every mechanical aid that human ingenuity could devise. Behind this, in turn, was a passionate desire to make money as well as to produce the highest art.
It is important to note that Renaissance sculptors did not have to rely on plaster studio casts to emulate the antique. In a sense the antique was always around them, in the shape of arms and legs and heads of broken Roman statues, which were still to be found in Italy in large numbers at the close of the Middle Ages. From the fourteenth century they began to be prized by collectors and artists. Art lovers would pay good prices for heads and torsos and mount them in the courtyards of their city palaces or on the garden terraces of their country villas. Artists studied and copied them. Some were also employed by patrons to mend broken antiques and carve fresh bits to complete the figure, though this was work that well-known sculptors were too proud to undertake. But just as scholars went in search of early manuscripts of classical works in monastery libraries, so artists rummaged through Roman ruins in search of artistic treasure. Whole statues in stone or marble were rare, and bronzes very scarce. The best in any case tended to be Roman copies of Greek originals. One bronze that did survive in a perfect state was the firstcentury A.D. Spinario, as it was called—a nude boy taking a thorn from his foot. This rested on a column outside St. John Lateran in Rome, near the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, and was much admired, especially by artists. It may well have inspired Donatello to create his David, just as the Marcus Aurelius undoubtedly encouraged him and Verrocchio to undertake equestrian bronzes. By the end of the fifteenth century, ambitious collectors were prepared to spend heavily on excavations of ancient sites likely to contain statuary. This was how the Apollo Belvedere, a geniune Greek statue, came to light in Rome in the 1490s, followed in 1506 by the Laocoön, one of the greatest masterpieces of antiquity. Both were acquired by Pope Julius II, who reigned 1503–13, and were the prize exhibits of his sculpture collections, which later formed the nucleus of the present Vatican Museum.
According to Vasari, studying the antique forms, not least in the palace of Julius II, was of critical importance to the work of the masters of what we call the High Renaissance, especially Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo. The last, in particular, learned from the ancients in all kinds of ways: design or disegno, choice of subject and materials, the actual carving, the finish, the balance between the parts and the whole, above all in developing a sense of monumentality, of grandeur, what the Italians call terribilità, the ability of art to inspire sheer awe. Michelangelo was born in Florence in 1475 and died in Rome eighty-nine years later. He had more than seventy years of active artistic life, without pause or rest, working as sculptor, painter and architect, and writing poetry too. More nonsense has been written about him than about any other great artist: that he was a neurotic, a homosexual, a Neoplatonist mystic, etc. In fact he was nothing more than a very skilled and energetic artist,
though often a very harassed one, who got himself into contractual messes, not always of his own devising. He never thought about anything except getting on with his art as best he could and worshiping God.
Michelangelo was primarily a sculptor, though it is probably true to say that he was more interested in the human form as such than in any particular way or medium in which to represent it. Obviously he found carving the best way of doing it, and his paintings tend to be two-dimensional sculptures. His wet nurse was a stone-carver’s wife from Settignano, and Michelangelo told Vasari that he “sucked in the chisels and mallet” with her milk. His father was an ambitious, social-climbing bourgeois of Florence, who kept Michelangelo at school until he was thirteen and was most reluctant to allow him to sculpt for a living, believing it to be manual work and demeaning. This may explain why the boy was first apprenticed to a painter, Domenico Ghirlandaio, in 1488. Only in the following year did he manage to get himself into the sculpture garden workshop in the Medici house at San Marco. He taught himself by copying the head of an antique faun, which attracted the attention of Lorenzo “the Magnificent.”
