Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [30]
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