Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance review – An essential exhibition

The V&A’s landmark show about the Renaissance sculptor reveals a complex and interesting character

Donatello, Pazzi Madonna, marble, courtesy of Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin (Antje Voigt, Berlin)

There’s a case to be made for Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi – that’s Donatello to you – as the most important sculptor of all time. The 15th century Florentine goldsmith turned bronze caster and marble hewer threw aside the stiff, ritualised art of the Middle Ages and created a new sculpture based on ancient Greek and Roman models, which transcended anything produced by the classical world. This new art was more dynamic, expressive and human than anything that had been seen before. Michelangelo, who was in many ways Donatello’s successor, made everything bigger, but essentially dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s of what Donatello had already done.

If that feels a shade grudging towards Michelangelo, it is essentially the rationale of this eagerly awaited exhibition, which is – unbelievably – the first full-scale Donatello show ever held in the country, and is already being hailed as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.   

Actually, it isn’t so surprising we’ve never had a Donatello exhibition when you reflect that most of his key works were cemented into Italian churches and palaces 600 years ago, and don’t move anywhere. This is the third of three related exhibitions, following shows at Florence’s Bargello Museum (the place to see Renaissance sculpture) and Berlin’s Staatliche Museum. The fear was that the London incarnation wouldn’t match the heft of the exhibits in the other two.

I haven’t seen the other two shows to be able to compare, but the early sight of one of Donatello’s major sculptures just beyond the entrance – one of several statues of David – with an enormous, gilded Head of God floating in the dimness beyond suggests London has mounted a punchy visual experience at the very least. While the marble David (1408-9) pulls out every stop to create an impression of vitality in the rippling drapery, on closer inspection the blank serenity of the youth’s clean-shaven face, with Goliath’s severed head plonked at his feet, hardly creates a sense of penetrating human truth.  

The patently theatrical Head of God, meanwhile, created for Milan cathedral by Beltramino de Zuttis da Rho, is one of many works by Donatello’s associates, contemporaries and followers included in the show. This reinforces the sense of Donatello working as part of a thriving art industry, rather than an isolated genius, and the fact that the piecing together of Donatello’s oeuvre from among vast numbers of works by other artists is ongoing.   

Three near life-size terracotta figures of the Virgin and Child have the lively emotional realism you’d hope for from an artist considered the first great sculptor of humanity. Jesus reaches to clasp Mary’s neck, as she closes her eyes with an expression of dazed rapture that will be familiar to any new mother, in a work from 1415, one of many in the exhibition that are only “possibly by Donatello”. 

Donatello, ‘Head of a Prophet’, courtesy of Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Firenze and The Ministry of Culture Italy (Bruno Bruchi)

A row of five busts, again not all by Donatello, gives a brilliant visual exposition of the accelerating realism in the male portrait over the century from 1375. A crudely stylised silver-gilt reliquary bust – designed to contain the relics of a saint – stands at one end of the row, and a patently homo-erotic head of a youth that screams High Renaissance at the other. If the latter work feels a touch too smoothly idealised, a stubble-headed man in the middle of the row – a “probable mayor of Florence”, we’re told, “probably by Donatello” – turns his head with an arrogant smirk that makes him feel all too brashly alive.  

A small white marble relief, Madonna of the Clouds (1425 to 35), shows how Donatello’s invention of a form of ultra-low relief, equivalent to the images seen on coins, allowed him to create a near-miraculous sense of painting in stone. The angels’ heads seem to merge in and out of the vaporous background. There’s a limit, however, to the number of seraphic Virgins and Child you can take, whether in marble, painted terracotta or bronze, before they start to blur into one. Yet every so often there’s one, such as The Madonna of the Apple with its sprawling sulky infant Christ, that brings you up short with its almost casual, everyday realism.  

A display of riotous cherubs wielding tambourines, together with the show’s poster boy, a guffawing bronze sprite in split trousers, give a glimpse of Donatello’s secular, hedonistic side. Or it’s a vicarious hedonism, perhaps, drummed up to please wealthy patrons. While it’s been claimed that Donatello was gay, as was the case with many Renaissance artists, it’s difficult, at this remove, to get a rounded sense of him as an artist, let alone as a human being. While this show makes a valiant attempt to give us the artist in full, it almost inevitably becomes a matter of trying to construct Donatello from his social and cultural context through an intriguing array of bits and pieces. Enough of this evidence is remarkable, however, to make this an essential exhibition.

Donatello, ‘Spiritello with a tambourine’, courtesy of Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin (Antje Voigt, Berlin)

The work that brought me closest to Donatello is a life-size and impressively anguished crucifixion in blackened bronze that normally hangs over the high altar in the Basilica of St Anthony in Padua, and looms dauntingly over our heads here. We get a powerful sense of the artist fighting to get a degree of “modern” realism into an image that’s too sacrosanct to be trifled with. Christ’s abs are absurdly taut, the fluttering of his loincloth suggesting, the wall text tells us, “that Christ is still alive, but in his final moments”. Yet this essay in ravaged muscularity remains rooted in another spiritual and historical dimension. The crucified Christ isn’t quite available to us in the here and now, but at least you can’t accuse Donatello of not trying. 

A number of works here by other artists, including a roundel of the Virgin and Child by Giovanni Pisano from 1270, show that the classicising impulse in Italian art had been ongoing over a century before Donatello hit the scene. Far from being the man who discarded the Gothic and singlehandedly kickstarted the Renaissance, as simplified histories would have it, the Donatello who emerges from this fascinating exhibition is a much more complex and interesting figure. He’s an artist poised between divergent traditions, trying to reconcile them in works that are sometimes clunky, but far more often transcendent.

‘Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance’ is at the V&A Museum until 11 June