2. Donatello
Vasari thought that Donatello had been among the artists chosen to make trial panels for the Baptistery doors; but Donatello was only a lad of sixteen at the time. The affectionate diminutive by which his friends and posterity named him denoted Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi. He learned his art only partly in Ghiberti’s studio; he soon struck out for himself, passed from the feminine grace of Ghibertian relief to virile statuary in the round, and revolutionized sculpture not so much by adopting classic methods and aims as by his uncompromising fidelity to nature, and the blunt force of his original personality and style. He was an independent spirit as tough as his David, as bold as his St. George.
His genius did not develop as rapidly as Ghiberti’s, but it reached greater scope and heights. When it matured it spawned masterpieces with reckless fertility, until Florence was populated with his statues, and countries beyond the Alps echoed his fame. At twenty-two he rivaled Ghiberti by carving for Or San Michele a figure of St. Peter; at twenty-seven he surpassed him by adding to that edifice a St. Mark so strong and simple and sincere that “it would have been impossible,” said Michelangelo, “to reject the Gospel preached by such a straightforward man as this.”*42 At twenty-three Donatello was engaged to carve a David for the cathedral; it was only the first of many Davids made by him; the subject never ceased to please his fancy; perhaps his finest work is the bronze David ordered by Cosimo, cast in 1430, set up in the courtyard of the Medici palace, and now in the Bargello. Here the nude figure in the round made its unblushing debut in Renaissance sculpture: a body smooth with the firm texture of youthful flesh, a face perhaps too Greek in profile, a helmet certainly too Greek; in this instance Donatello put realism aside, indulged his imagination richly, and almost equaled Michelangelo’s more famous figure of the future Hebrew king.
He was not so successful with the Baptist; it was a dour subject alien to his earthly spirit; the two statues of John in the Bargello are lifeless and absurd. Far finer is a stone relief of a child’s head, named for no good reason San Giovannino— the youthful St. John. In the same Salone Donatelliano St. George unites all the idealism of a militant Christianity with the restrained lines of Greek art: a figure firmly and confidently poised, a body mature and strong, a head Gothically oval and yet prefiguring the classic Brutus of Buonarotti. For the cathedral façade at Florence he made two powerful figures—of Jeremiah and Habbakuk, the latter so bald that Donatello called him lo Zuccone, “the big pumpkin.” On the Loggia dei Lanzi Donatello’s bronze Judith, commissioned by Cosimo, still brandishes her sword over Holofernes; the wine-drugged general sleeps placidly before his decapitation; he is masterfully conceived and cast; but the young tyrannicide, overwhelmed with drapery, approaches her deed with inopportune calm.
On a brief trip to Rome (1432) Donatello designed a classic tabernacle in marble for the old St. Peter’s. Probably in Rome he studied the portrait busts that had survived from the days of the Empire; in any case it was he who developed the first significant portrait sculpture of the Renaissance. His chef-d’oeuvre in portraiture was his bust, in painted terra cotta, of the politician Niccolò da Uzzano; here he amused and expressed himself with a realism that offered no compliments but revealed a man. Donatello made his own discovery of the old truth that art need not always pursue beauty, but must seek to select and reveal significant form. Many dignitaries risked the veracity of his chisel, sometimes to their discomfiture. A Genoese merchant, dissatisfied with himself as Donatello saw him, haggled about the price; the matter was referred to Cosimo, who judged that Donatello had asked too little. The merchant complained that the artist had taken only a month for the work, so that the fee demanded came to half a florin ($12.50) per day—too much, he thought, for a mere artist. Donatello smashed the bust into a thousand pieces, saying that this was a man who could bargain intelligently only about beans.43
The cities of Italy appreciated him better, and competed for his services. Siena, Rome, and Venice lured him for a time, but Padua saw him fashion his masterpiece. In the church of St. Anthony he carved a marble screen for the altar that covered the bones of the great Franciscan; and over it he placed moving reliefs and a bronze Crucifixion most tenderly conceived. In the piazza before the church he set up (1453) the first important equestrian statue of modern times; inspired, doubtless, by the mounted Aurelius in Rome, but thoroughly Renaissance in face and mood; no idealized philosopher-king, but a man of visibly contemporary character, fearless, ruthless, powerful—Gattamelata, “the honeyed cat,” the Venetian general. It is true that the chafing, foaming horse is too big for his legs, and that the pigeons, innocent of Vasari, daily bespatter the bald head of the conquering condottiere; but the pose is proud and strong, as if all the virtu of Machiavelli’s longing had here passed with the fused bronze to harden in Donatello’s mold. Padua gazed in astonishment and glory at this hero rescued from mortality, gave the artist 1650 golden ducats ($41,250) for his six years of toil, and begged him to make their city his home. He whimsically demurred: his art could never improve at Padua, where all men praised him; he must, for art’s sake, return to Florence, where all men criticized all.
In truth he returned to Florence because Cosimo needed him, and he loved Cosimo. Cosimo was a man who understood art, and gave him intelligent and bountiful commissions; so close was the entente between them that Donatello “divined from the slightest indication all that Cosimo desired.”44 At Donatello’s suggestion Cosimo collected ancient statuary, sarcophagi, arches, columns, and capitals, and placed them in the Medici gardens for young artists to study. For Cosimo, with Michelozzo’s collaboration, Donatello set up in the Baptistery a tomb of the refugee Antipope John XXIII. For Cosimo’s favorite church, San Lorenzo, he carved two pulpits, and adorned them with bronze reliefs of the Passion; from those pulpits, among others, Savonarola would launch his bolts against later Medici. For the altar he molded a lovely terra-cotta bust of St. Lawrence; for the Old Sacristy he designed two pairs of bronze doors, and a simple but beautiful sarcophagus for Cosimo’s parents. Other works came from him as if they were child’s play: an exquisite stone relief of the Annunciation for the church of Santa Croce; for the cathedral a Cantoria of Singing Boys—plump putti violently chanting hymns (1433–8); a bronze bust of a Young Man, the incarnation of healthy youth (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art); a Santa Cecilia (possibly by Desiderio da Settignano), fair enough to be the Christian muse of song; a bronze relief of the Crucifixion (in the Bargello) overpowering in its realistic detail; and in Santa Croce another Crucifixion, a gaunt and solitary figure in wood, one of the most moving representations of this scene, despite Brunellesco’s criticism of it as “a crucified peasant.”