Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [28]
He was the son of a humble wood-carver and remained, all his life, a man who worked with his hands. Unlike many successful Renaissance artists, such as Ghiberti, to whom he was apprenticed between 1404 and 1407, Donatello had no social pretensions, no aesthetic pride, no swagger. He spoke and lived in a rough way, like the craftsman he was. He never made much money, and in his old age, he lived on a pension from Cosimo de’ Medici, who worshiped him. He does not seem to have accepted the fact that artists could now move in the best society and were becoming highly prized individuals, famous men. He was not interested. To that extent, one of the central facts of the Renaissance, the emergence of the artist celebrity, left him unimpressed.
On the other hand, Donatello possessed artistic integrity to an unusual degree. He was unbiddable. His sense of honor, as a craftsman-artist, was overwhelming. He would do what he thought right, at his own pace, in his own way. Princes and cardinals did not impress him. Plebeian he was, but he spoke to them on artistic matters as an equal, indeed as a master. Like Ghiberti he was a perfectionist, and would sometimes take years to get something absolutely right. He was not to be hurried, and if bullied would down tools. His name figures in hundreds of documents and many stories circulated about his rude sayings, rough humor, obduracy and unwillingness to take orders. His patrons, to their credit, respected him. One reason why the Renaissance produced so many marvelous works of art is that a high proportion of great and rich men were willing to respect artists who knew their minds and their worth. Here, Donatello led the way in educating the elite to a true spirit of cooperation with artists, so that by a paradox he, the obstinate plebeian, played a historic role in raising the social status of the producer of beauty from craftsman to artist. After Donatello, there was no turning back: in Florence first, soon in all Italy, the artist was a man who commanded not only respect but attention, reverence, admiration and honor.
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