Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [29]
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