MY ESCAPE FROM “THERE IS NO ESCAPE” – PART ONE

When the dragon of despair needs to be slain, nobody slays it better than Donatello, the Renaissance, sponsored by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Musei del Bargello in Florence. We saw the show in late May with friends visiting from San Francisco, and it is definitely a do-not-miss.

Before seeing this comprehensive exhibition, my knowledge of Donatello (1386-1466) was limited to his bronze David Victorious (1408-1409), below.  

I first saw this sculpture in a Fine Arts 13 slide lecture at Harvard in 1967, but it wasn’t until 1984 that I saw the original at the Bargello.  Because of its rather fussy treatment of the young boy who defeated Goliath with a sling shot, (I remember Professor Janson called it “effeminate”), 

I somehow always thought of Donatello as an artist of the fussy Baroque Period.  In fact, he was at the forefront of the Italian Renaissance and his influence on other Renaissance masters is formidable.

Here is a description of the exhibition from the Strozzi website:

From 19 March to 31 July 2022 the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Musei del Bargello host Donatello, the Renaissance, an historic, once-in-a-lifetime exhibition which sets out to reconstruct the astonishing career of one of the most important and influential masters of Italian art of any age, juxtaposing his work with masterpieces by artists who were his contemporaries such as Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael and Michelangelo.

Curated by Francesco Caglioti, professor of medieval art history at the Scuola Normale di Pisa, the exhibition showcases over 130 works of art including sculptures, paintings and drawings, with unique loans, some of which have never been granted before now, from almost sixty of the world’s leading museums and institutions. Hosted in two venues, Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Donatello, the Renaissance allows visitors to explore the life, works and legacy of this “master of masters.” The supreme sculptor of the Quattrocento, Donatello triggered the revolutionary age that was the Renaissance, developing new ideas and figurative solutions that were to mark the history of Western art for ever. Through his work Donatello regenerated the very notion of sculpture, combining the most recent discoveries in the field of perspective with the psychological dimension of art, embracing the full range of human emotions in all their deepest diversity.

We didn't visit the Bargello this time, where Donatello's works were curated in dialogue with his contemporaries and followers, but the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi is organized thematically.  The first room demonstrates Donatello’s debt to antiquity and features two enormous heads of horses, both in bronze, one from ancient Greece and the other by Donatello.  Here is the Greek example

and here is Donatello’s even more muscular interpretation.

There was an entire room devoted to sculptures of the Madonna and Child in terracotta.

Other renderings of Mary and her baby were done in marble, like this intimate portrait loaned by one of the State Museums of Berlin and known as the Pazzi Madonna.  They seem to exist in a world of two, completely oblivious to our presence.

Donatello revisited his subjects over the course of his artistic career, reinterpreting them at different stages in their lives.  Here is Donatello’s rendering of Saint John the Baptist as a young boy

and here he is as an old man.

Donatello took the Renaissance notion of perspective first expressed in fresco by Giotto and used it to create three-dimensional, deep spaces in deceptivly shallow wall sculptures like these.  He presages the Baroque by allowing his figures to escape the picture frame and come forward to engage with us.

True to the humanism that is the hallmark of the Renaissance, Donatello's subjects are full of emotion and character, and he is thought to have worked from live models.

With the exhibition at a close and the dragons of despair now safely slain, Donatello turns our thoughts to love as his Amorino Attis draws his bow to conquer all with a laugh.

If you would like to read more about Donatello’s life and art, here is his Wiki

Keep it real!

Marilyn