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00:00:16Moulton glass dropped into a mould and flattened out as it cools to make a perfect impression.
00:00:26The place, the Royal College of Art, and a moment of tension and excitement.
00:00:31As far as we know, no one has tried this experiment before.
00:00:41It's to cast a circular glass plaque, a roundel, but no ordinary roundel.
00:00:47The mould for this one was made early in the Italian Renaissance.
00:00:58It's a Madonna and Child by a sculptor born 600 years ago.
00:01:03This unique process is just one of the many techniques he exploited, for he was among the
00:01:07most versatile, the most imaginative artists of his century, perhaps of any century.
00:01:38Donatello is one of those sculptors who in every age seems new, because his theme was human
00:01:44life itself.
00:01:47He was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael studied his compositions, centuries later he inspired
00:01:53Rodin.
00:01:54Unmatched in his expressive range, he remains radical, singular, and intensely personal.
00:02:13The dome of Florence Cathedral, symbol of a city which in the early 1400s was the centre of that extraordinary
00:02:20breakthrough of ideas, the Renaissance.
00:02:24Donatello had played a small part in the building of this dome, and with its architect Brunelleschi,
00:02:30he went on to become one of the creators of that movement which leads out of the Middle Ages towards
00:02:35the modern world.
00:02:41Donatello's sculptures could be seen wherever you went in Florence.
00:02:44They bore witness to the Renaissance spirit, to a new interest in realism and the character
00:02:50of the individual, to the rediscovered beauty and harmony of classical forms derived from ancient
00:02:56Greece and Rome.
00:02:58They were seen in churches, they were seen on public buildings.
00:03:01The lily and heraldic lion of Florence used to stand outside the town hall itself, while
00:03:08inside stood the marble David, though both are now retired to a museum.
00:03:14Until quite recently, the Judith and Holofernes could be seen in the main square, the Piazza
00:03:19della Signoria.
00:03:20These major sculptures have been known and admired for five centuries as part of the very
00:03:25fabric of Florence.
00:03:29But others still play a humbler role in the city's life.
00:03:33The art historian Charles Avery went searching for them, because their significance is often
00:03:38overlooked when many of Donatello's originals have been taken indoors and replaced by copies.
00:03:45Well off the tourist beat in the Via Pietra Piana, there's a Madonna and Child in a shrine high
00:03:51up on a street corner.
00:03:53The guidebook says it's a Donatello, but who knows, nobody's examined it for years.
00:03:58With the help of the sculptor Peter Rockwell, Avery wanted to check for himself.
00:04:05This window looks like it's about to fall off.
00:04:09It's looking pretty good, actually, yes.
00:04:12There's a great deal of modelling all over the surface.
00:04:16I think the tool marks even on the drapery here, around the child's knees,
00:04:21even in the detail of the wooden throne that's been carved in wood,
00:04:26you can see the marks of the chisel as though it had really been carved.
00:04:29It's really looking tremendously exciting.
00:04:35It's beautiful down here.
00:04:36Yeah, there's been a lot of damage up here, obviously.
00:04:39You see this crack running even through the child's head.
00:04:42I don't touch it, I think it might fall off.
00:04:46I'm pretty sure it's terracotta.
00:04:47I'm just going to cut out this little thing and see if we can scratch it at all.
00:04:58It's certainly coming away with proper red dust, you know.
00:05:02I think the white look one had is the repairs.
00:05:06After 500 years, the whole range of Donatello's work is now being re-explored and reassessed.
00:05:13For example, is this portrait of Niccolò da Ozzano a genuine Donatello?
00:05:18For years, it's been doubted, though the bust has always been famous.
00:05:22Now, layers of overpainting are being removed and its stunning quality revealed.
00:05:34Quality is still not positive proof, but it does narrow the margin of doubt.
00:05:41Here, in Florence, an ambitious program of cleaning and restoration
00:05:44is throwing new light on Donatello's procedures.
00:05:47And it may even be that forensic evidence could supply the proof that's needed here.
00:05:52For the bust was modelled in clay, and in that clay are the fingerprints of whoever made it.
00:06:01The great sculptor they called Little Donato was known, it seems, as something of a character in Florence.
00:06:08A fresco by Masaccio, for instance, is said to show him in the role of a street beggar,
00:06:13for he was, as one friend described him,
00:06:15the kind of man for whom any little handout is adequate.
00:06:18He's well pleased to be given anything at all.
00:06:24By contrast, the terseness of his tongue was equally well known.
00:06:28For the church of Santa Croce he'd carved a crucifix in wood,
00:06:31of which his friend Brunelleschi remarked that he'd crucified a peasant.
00:06:35Retorted Donatello, go and get some wood, and you try carving one.
00:06:41Colourful anecdotes abound in the one biography we have of him by Vasari,
00:06:46but there's nothing first-hand, no letters, no personal writings.
00:06:50But in the records of the Cathedral Board of Works,
00:06:53in the archives of Florence and other cities he lived and worked in,
00:06:56references are astonishingly numerous, nearly 400 of them.
00:07:00The very first comes, rather disconcertingly,
00:07:03from the legal records of Pistoia near Florence,
00:07:06and concerns Donato at the age of 16.
00:07:10Pistoia, 26th of January, 1401.
00:07:13Donato, son of Niccolo di Beto Bardi of Florence,
00:07:16is bound over to keep the peace,
00:07:17in that he hit over the head with a stick,
00:07:19Anichino, son of Peter the German, and drew blood.
00:07:25Donatello came of a rough, tough, working-class background,
00:07:28and if by temperament he was passionate, not to say explosive,
00:07:32that probably came from Niccolo, his father.
00:07:35Niccolo was involved as a young man in the workers' revolt,
00:07:38known as the Chompy Rebellion,
00:07:40and at one stage he was even exiled from Florence for murder.
00:07:43He'd only recently returned there when Donatello was born.
00:07:47By trade, he was a carder of wool.
00:07:53His son may have been educated in that monastic tradition
00:07:57of dedicating his life to art by renouncing marriage.
00:08:00It was not uncommon among scholars at that time,
00:08:03and there's no record that he did ever marry.
00:08:06On the other hand, the evidence suggests
00:08:08he was over-fond of his studio boys.
00:08:11No great stigma attached to that
00:08:14in the intellectual circles he moved in.
00:08:16Man strove for harmony in his life
00:08:18by learning how to harness those twin horses of the soul,
00:08:22passion, and reason.
00:08:24That was, after all, the ideal of self-governance
00:08:27that Plato himself had taught.
00:08:37Donatello would have learnt his craft as a teenage apprentice,
00:08:41but to practise any craft as a professional
00:08:44you had to belong to a guild, a kind of trade union.
00:08:48As a matter of civic duty,
00:08:50the guilds divided between them responsibility
00:08:52for maintaining and improving
00:08:54the city's main religious buildings.
00:08:56For instance, the Wool Merchants Guild
00:08:59looked after Florence Cathedral and its Campanile,
00:09:02and their rivals, the cloth finishers,
00:09:04paid for the upkeep of the baptistry next door.
00:09:08Between such close neighbours,
00:09:10comparisons were much in the public eye
00:09:12and the guilds were fiercely competitive.
00:09:17The baptistry itself was ripe for embellishment,
00:09:21and it was here that Donatello, at the age of 18,
00:09:24was engaged to work on what was to become
00:09:26the most prestigious project in the city,
00:09:28the making of a great pair of bronze doors.
00:09:33It's said he even submitted a design himself,
00:09:35but the commission was won
00:09:37in the first open competition of its kind
00:09:39ever held by Lorenzo Ghiberti.
00:09:41The year was 1402,
00:09:43and it made Ghiberti the city's leading sculptor
00:09:46for years to come.
00:09:52Ghiberti was a goldsmith who became
00:09:55the greatest modeler and bronze founderman of the day,
00:09:58and for three years,
00:09:59Donatello was one of his assistants.
00:10:01More than that, he absorbed in Ghiberti's workshop
00:10:04a technique, a style, and a vision,
00:10:06a vision still largely Gothic,
00:10:08but adapting now to new, more classical proportions.
00:10:16But the bronze doors may not be all he worked on.
00:10:20Recently, scholars have begun to search
00:10:22for the young Donatello's hand among the surviving
00:10:24terracottas of the period.
00:10:26They think they may have found what they were looking for
00:10:28in these hexagonal panels.
00:10:31The figures of Adam and Eve are more naive than Ghiberti's,
00:10:34but they're more dramatically imagined
00:10:36and more vigorously modelled.
00:10:42When we next hear of Donato,
00:10:44he's working independently on commissions
00:10:46for the cathedral itself.
00:10:4823rd of November, 1406.
00:10:51Donato, son of Niccolo Carver,
00:10:53is to make profits in marble
00:10:54to go above the door of the church of Santa Maria,
00:10:57and for his labour he is to receive ten gold florins.
00:11:04Looking distinctly tentative and Ghiberti influenced,
00:11:07these figures hardly prepare us
00:11:09for the artist's growing ambition and self-confidence.
00:11:13Three years later, still in his early twenties,
00:11:16and Donatello's moved centre stage,
00:11:18carving one of four colossal statues
00:11:21to flank the great west doors of the cathedral.
00:11:24St John the Evangelist in marble,
00:11:26seven feet high, six years in the making.
00:11:32But he no longer looks down,
00:11:34as he was meant to, from the cathedral facade.
00:11:36All four evangelists were later removed and taken indoors.
00:11:41The St John shows us Donatello
00:11:43discovering already a power
00:11:46that foreshadows Michelangelo himself.
00:11:49He was now much in demand.
00:11:52In 1416, the civic authorities
00:11:54asked for a David and Goliath in marble
00:11:57for the town hall.
00:11:59We know from the bills
00:12:00that it was elaborately painted and gilded
00:12:02with an ornate background,
00:12:04like this earlier Gothic relief.
00:12:09Today, the David has lost its bright colours.
00:12:12They would have made it look far less bland
00:12:15and related it better
00:12:16to the ornamental style fashionable at that time.
00:12:23And in the swaying elegance
00:12:25and sinuous Gothic line,
00:12:27he's really glancing again at Ghiberti,
00:12:29formerly his master,
00:12:31now his only real rival.
00:12:41But what exactly does he mean by it,
00:12:43this graceful, nonchalant pose?
00:12:46Is it what his patrons expected?
00:12:49For it's hardly a conventional reading
00:12:51of David the freedom fighter,
00:12:53heroic symbol of a city's defiance of its foes.
00:12:57Willfully unorthodox
00:12:59or profoundly original?
00:13:02Donatello is both at the same time.
00:13:04Curiously and without warning,
00:13:06he changes key in his head of Goliath.
00:13:08It's like that of a classical god
00:13:11from ancient Rome.
00:13:16In total contrast to the David
00:13:19is the famous St. George,
00:13:21begun in 1415.
00:13:23This resolute Christian knight
00:13:25was an apt commission
00:13:26from the Guild of Armourers
00:13:28for Orsanmichele the Guild Hall.
00:13:31Originally projecting like a shop sign
00:13:32above the passer-by,
00:13:34he held a real metal sword,
00:13:35though that's long since disappeared.
00:13:40No ambiguous elegance this time,
00:13:43but a calm purpose.
00:13:47The concentrated simplicity of this sculpture,
00:13:51its alert humanity,
00:13:52have struck generations of admirers
00:13:54as the perfect expression
00:13:56of youthful idealism,
00:13:58devotion and courage.
00:14:00As Vasari put it,
00:14:02there is a marvellous suggestion
00:14:03of life bursting out of the stone
00:14:06and in the head
00:14:07a proud and terrible ardour.
00:14:11This sense of life in the stone
00:14:13was the real revelation
00:14:14of classical sculpture
00:14:16to the early Renaissance.
00:14:17We know from Manetti's biography
00:14:20of Brunelleschi
00:14:20that as young men,
00:14:22he and Donatello
00:14:23spent months together in Rome
00:14:24excavating and studying
00:14:26classical remains.
00:14:27What they saw
00:14:28was the figure in action,
00:14:30depicted with a freedom
00:14:31and naturalness
00:14:32that was as convincing
00:14:33as it was dramatic.
00:14:39They admired the rare works in bronze
00:14:42that had survived from ancient times,
00:14:44astounding masterpieces
00:14:45of modelling and casting.
00:14:48For over a thousand years,
00:14:50art had never looked like life.
00:14:52But here was sculpture
00:14:53from a pre-Christian world
00:14:55that mirrored life itself.
00:14:57The shock, the excitement
00:14:58of that rediscovery
00:14:59was what had set the Renaissance alight.
00:15:02Man could be portrayed
00:15:03in all the truth and splendour
00:15:05of his humanity,
00:15:06in all the realism
00:15:07of his living presence.
00:15:10And that was the challenge
00:15:11Donatello rose to
00:15:13in his next major commission.
00:15:17High up on the Campanile,
00:15:19the bell tower
00:15:20of Florence Cathedral,
00:15:21were to be set life-size statues
00:15:23of Old Testament prophets,
00:15:25their gestures distinct
00:15:26and their faces legible
00:15:28from over fifty feet below.
00:15:30The ones there now
00:15:31are modern copies,
00:15:32but you can see the originals
00:15:34at close quarters
00:15:35in the Cathedral Museum.
00:15:36They are quite alarmingly powerful.
00:15:42Five hundred years ago,
00:15:44realism taken this far
00:15:46was revolutionary.
00:15:47No one had ever seen
00:15:48such vigorous modelling,
00:15:50such forceful characterisation.
00:15:52In fact, people at the time
00:15:54were convinced
00:15:55they were actual portraits
00:15:56of Florentine notabilities.
00:16:04The last prophet,
00:16:06Habakkuk,
00:16:06took eight years to carve.
00:16:08He became Donatello's obsession.
00:16:11As he wrestled endlessly
00:16:13to make the stone express
00:16:15all he felt,
00:16:16Vasari tells us
00:16:17how he would growl at it.
00:16:19Speak.
00:16:20Speak,
00:16:21or may you shit blood.
00:16:30But when finally
00:16:31the struggle was over,
00:16:33his attitude changed.
00:16:34He became quite attached
00:16:36to his creation
00:16:37and took to swearing,
00:16:38by the faith
00:16:39that I place
00:16:40in my old baldy.
00:16:48Realism of character
00:16:49was revolutionary,
00:16:51but if we turn again
00:16:52to the St George,
00:16:53we find, below the statue itself,
00:16:55yet another innovation.
00:16:57A relief in perspective,
00:16:59portraying the saint
00:17:00as master of his environment.
00:17:03Carved in 1417,
00:17:05it's the first dated example
00:17:06of that Renaissance concern
00:17:08to place figures
00:17:09in a realistic setting
00:17:11of architecture
00:17:12and landscape.
00:17:14Brunelleschi and Masoucho
00:17:15were to take
00:17:16the perspective idea further,
00:17:17but this panel
00:17:18anticipates them both.
00:17:29The shallow carving here
00:17:30was itself an innovation,
00:17:32which we see Donatello developing
00:17:34in his collaboration
00:17:35on this tomb
00:17:36for Naples in 1427.
00:17:39For such commissions,
00:17:40he had set up in partnership,
00:17:42very successfully,
00:17:43with the architect sculptor
00:17:44Michalozzo,
00:17:45and the radically new
00:17:47classical spirit
00:17:48in which they designed
00:17:49projects like this
00:17:50set a pattern
00:17:51for all Renaissance sculptors.
00:17:57Michalozzo was responsible
00:17:58for the funeral effigy
00:17:59of Cardinal Brancacci,
00:18:01and indeed for much
00:18:02of the other carving,
00:18:04but the real focus
00:18:05of attention
00:18:06is Donatello's own carving,
00:18:08a delicate low relief
00:18:09of the assumption
00:18:10of the Virgin.
00:18:12She is being transported
00:18:13to paradise
00:18:14in an aureole
00:18:15of suffused light
00:18:17by tears of angels
00:18:18moving through the clouds.
00:18:25The technique which produced
00:18:27such subtly pictorial effects
00:18:29was entirely Donatello's invention,
00:18:32without precedent
00:18:33in either classical
00:18:34or medieval practice.
00:18:39In earlier relief carving,
00:18:41the sculptor
00:18:42and his assistants
00:18:42would use the chisel
00:18:43and the drill
00:18:44to cut down
00:18:45through the marble.
00:18:53The foreground figures
00:18:55would then stand out
00:18:56from the background
00:18:57half or more in the round,
00:18:59like statuettes
00:19:00set against a flat slab.
00:19:03The differences
00:19:04between this earlier
00:19:06kind of workshop practice
00:19:07and Donatello's
00:19:08very personal,
00:19:09individual approach
00:19:10have long been
00:19:11an interest
00:19:11of the sculptor
00:19:12Peter Rockwell.
00:19:13Now the 14th century relief,
00:19:16the techniques,
00:19:17it's basically
00:19:17it's a craftsman's work
00:19:19rather than what
00:19:20we would think of
00:19:21in modern terms
00:19:21as an artist's work.
00:19:23Now Donatello,
00:19:24in contrast,
00:19:25reduces the tools
00:19:26down to two or three tools,
00:19:29point tool,
00:19:30flat chisel
00:19:31and quite possibly
00:19:32the round chisel.
00:19:33And what he does
00:19:35is he takes the flat chisel
00:19:38and he can just carve,
00:19:40you see,
00:19:40with the corner in there,
00:19:42you could,
00:19:43you could literally
00:19:43draw something.
00:19:46Uh,
00:19:46I could just draw a line
00:19:48like that,
00:19:49going around.
00:19:52And take the other side
00:19:54of the chisel
00:19:54and,
00:19:55and work one's way
00:19:57across the carving.
00:20:02Then taking
00:20:04a point chisel
00:20:05and where I see something
00:20:08that I want to get rid of
00:20:09a little bit of background,
00:20:10just delicately carving.
00:20:15I think it's important
00:20:17to be very clear about this
00:20:18because it's not a form
00:20:19of drawing
00:20:20and then transferring
00:20:21into marble,
00:20:22which would be
00:20:23the modern technique.
00:20:24It's drawing directly
00:20:25into the marble
00:20:26so that if you don't like
00:20:27the movement of a finger,
00:20:29you can,
00:20:29you can move it.
00:20:30You have such low relief
00:20:32and such a kind of
00:20:33a free-moving technique
00:20:35that the carver,
00:20:36uh,
00:20:37gets himself
00:20:38into the habit
00:20:39of just, uh,
00:20:40letting the level
00:20:41of depth find itself.
00:20:43The level is free
00:20:45and relates directly
00:20:47to the drawing
00:20:48that you're doing
00:20:49with the chisel
00:20:49and the marble.
00:21:00The Donatello reliefs,
00:21:02where you can see them
00:21:03in a relatively original state,
00:21:05you see that he did
00:21:07all of his finishing
00:21:07with chisels
00:21:08and the 14th century relief
00:21:10is normally finished
00:21:11with abrasive stones
00:21:12of one form or another.
00:21:13And so he isn't looking
00:21:15for smoothness,
00:21:16he's looking for effect.
00:21:23Nowhere is that search
00:21:24for effect
00:21:25more beautifully realized
00:21:26than in this panel.
00:21:30It shows the disciples
00:21:31gathered round
00:21:32to bear witness
00:21:33as Christ ascends
00:21:35into heaven
00:21:35and leans down
00:21:36to bestow on St. Peter
00:21:38the leadership
00:21:38of the church.
00:21:43This really is drawing
00:21:45with the chisel.
00:21:46The depth of carving
00:21:47is no more than
00:21:48five millimeters,
00:21:49yet it's enough
00:21:50to catch every nuance
00:21:51of light and form.
00:22:00Hands, gestures, expressions,
00:22:02each one sketches
00:22:04a distinct personality,
00:22:06an individual emotion.
00:22:16and behind them all,
00:22:18a miraculously spacious,
00:22:20light-filled landscape.
00:22:27When the time came round
00:22:29for tax returns,
00:22:30Donatello, money shy
00:22:31as always,
00:22:32got his partner
00:22:33Michalozzo
00:22:34to make out his declaration.
00:22:3611th of July, 1427.
00:22:38This is the property
00:22:40and obligations
00:22:41of Donatello,
00:22:42son of Niccolo di Beto Carver.
00:22:45Without any property,
00:22:46except for a few household goods
00:22:48for personal and family use.
00:22:50I rent a house
00:22:51from Guglielmo Adimari
00:22:53and there I have the following.
00:22:55Myself, Donato, aged 41.
00:22:57Mona Orsa, my mother, 80.
00:23:00Mona Tita, my sister,
00:23:02a widow without dowry, 45.
00:23:04Giuliano, son of Mona Tita, crippled 18.
00:23:10I practice my art in partnership
00:23:12with Michalozzo di Bartolomeo
00:23:14with no capital
00:23:15except 30 florins worth
00:23:16of various tools and equipment
00:23:18for professional use.
00:23:20And from this partnership,
00:23:22I earn my living.
00:23:26This was one of the actual workshops.
00:23:30Michalozzo was already experienced
00:23:31in metal casting
00:23:32and with his help,
00:23:34Donatello made his first major work
00:23:36not merely in bronze
00:23:37but in gilded bronze,
00:23:39an extravagantly costly medium.
00:23:40It was a statue commissioned
00:23:43by the pro-French party in Florence,
00:23:45the Guelphs,
00:23:46choosing a French saint,
00:23:47St Louis of Toulouse,
00:23:48literally to outshine their rivals.
00:23:53To fuse gold leaf to its surface,
00:23:56the bronze had to be re-fired after casting
00:23:59which meant building up the figure
00:24:00from sections of bronze drapery
00:24:03small enough to go into
00:24:04a high-temperature kiln.
00:24:06From now on,
00:24:08Donatello began to use drapery itself
00:24:10for expressive effect.
00:24:15An entry from the baptistry archives
00:24:18of Siena Cathedral.
00:24:20Siena, 27th of April, 1429.
00:24:23The daughter of Tommaso,
00:24:25son of Paolo di Venuccio,
00:24:26goldsmith,
00:24:27was held at the font by Donatello.
00:24:30For that very font,
00:24:31he provided baby angels in bronze
00:24:34in the same month he had stood by it
00:24:36as a godfather,
00:24:37together with a figure of hope
00:24:39and another representing faith.
00:24:44Like the statue of St Louis,
00:24:46the bronze here too is gilded,
00:24:48and the sculptural rhythms are concentrated
00:24:51in the drapery.
00:24:54The font had been designed by the Sienese sculptor
00:24:58of Jacobo della Quercia,
00:24:59with contributions from several others.
00:25:02Donatello's main one was a dramatic relief again
00:25:05in gilded bronze,
00:25:07and the subject was the feast of Herod.
00:25:14Every trick of perspective draws the eye to Herod himself,
00:25:18shrinking back in horror as John the Baptist's head
00:25:22is presented to him on a charger.
00:25:30When it comes to horrors like Goya,
00:25:33like Picasso,
00:25:34Donatello spares neither brutality
00:25:36nor the shock of outrage.
00:25:39And he heightens the effect by uncoiling with sinister grace
00:25:43the figure of Salome dancing in triumph at the enemy's death
00:25:47like a classical bacchante.
00:25:54He was spending more and more time studying classical sculptures,
00:25:58and by this time was even collecting them.
00:26:01And reliefs on Trajan's column in Rome
00:26:03probably gave him the idea of cutting off action
00:26:06into compartments like a strip cartoon.
00:26:11The Baptist's head is brought up from the dungeons,
00:26:14nearer past the musicians playing for Salome,
00:26:17and so into Herod's presence and ours.
00:26:21Earlier artists would have shown the whole palace,
00:26:25the convention being that you took away the front wall
00:26:27to show the action inside.
00:26:30Donatello, more experimental, more modern,
00:26:32cuts straight to the interior.
00:26:36Using the same subject, Herod's Feast,
00:26:38but carved this time in marble,
00:26:40he experimented with space again,
00:26:43emphasizing the perspective to stage the action
00:26:46in a kind of open courtyard.
00:26:48And for once he rather overdid it,
00:26:51but the space looks more dramatic
00:26:53than the story it frames.
00:27:01Never again did he allow his actors to appear
00:27:04quite so subservient to their setting.
00:27:28In 1434, Florence at last settled down
00:27:32to a period of relative political stability,
00:27:34after a particularly violent series of power struggles
00:27:37between the city's great families.
00:27:39The head of one of them, a wealthy banker,
00:27:42came back from exile and established himself
00:27:44at the helm of Florentine politics.
00:27:47The great age of the Medici had begun.
00:27:52Cosimo de Medici was to prove the patron and friend
00:27:55who understood Donatello better than anyone,
00:27:58even though, as Vasari tells us,
00:28:00their ways of life were so utterly different.
00:28:04Since Donatello did not dress as Cosimo would have liked him to,
00:28:07Cosimo gave him a red cloak with a hood and a gown.
00:28:10One feast day, he sent them to the sculptor
00:28:13in the hope that he would wear them.
00:28:16Donatello did once or twice and then put them aside,
00:28:19as they struck him as being too dandified.
00:28:24Cosimo was acquiring property in the city
00:28:26where ultimately he would build a palace.
00:28:28And in the old inn of Santa Catarina,
00:28:31he was now able to offer the sculptor lodgings and a workshop.
00:28:35He charged a peppercorn rent for them,
00:28:37a mere five florins a year.
00:28:40But Donatello was always behind with payments.
00:28:43He was notoriously averse to giving his mind to such matters.
00:28:47He was most liberal, gracious and courteous,
00:28:50and even more careful for his friends' interests than for his own.
00:28:54Nor did he give a thought for money,
00:28:56but kept it in a basket, hung by a cord from the ceiling,
00:29:00so that all his workmen and friends
00:29:02could take what they needed without bothering him.
00:29:05A new studio, hard by the Medici Church of San Lorenzo,
00:29:09was probably linked to work for Cosimo.
00:29:13The tomb of Cosimo's father, Giovanni di Bici,
00:29:16was set in the very centre of the old sacristy,
00:29:19an architectural masterpiece by Brunelleschi completed in 1428.
00:29:28Donatello was called on to embellish the roundels in the vault.
00:29:31Four of them he filled with scenes from the life of St John the Evangelist.
00:29:37Now a master in the art of perspective,
00:29:40he effortlessly projects a great vaulted space,
00:29:43like that of an ancient Roman bathhouse,
00:29:45as a setting for the saint's raising of Drusiana from the dead.
00:29:53For his ascension into heaven, an ingenious skyscraper effect,
00:29:57as if in the stalls a spectator peers over the edge of the stage
00:30:01and leads our gaze upwards through converging lines of architecture
00:30:05to where the saint takes his leave of this mortal world.
00:30:13Using another four roundels like windows,
00:30:17Donatello takes us into the privacy of their studies
00:30:20as the writers of the Gospels meditate upon their work.
00:30:23St Luke, identified by his symbol, the winged ox.
00:30:28And once again, St John,
00:30:30the moving and imaginative portraits of a pensive, melancholy sage.
00:30:38But for years, the full beauty of Donatello's scheme of decoration
00:30:41has been obliterated by damp, grime and overpainting.
00:30:48The gridiron on which was martyred San Lorenzo,
00:30:51the saint to whom the church is dedicated.
00:30:53Some philistine painted the whole figure to look like bronze.
00:31:02But now all the reliefs are being cleaned and restored
00:31:05to the brilliance of their original full colour and delicate gilding.
00:31:27The story goes that those long-standing friends, Brunelleschi and Donatello,
00:31:32fell out over the insertion of highly coloured narratives
00:31:35into such an austere architectural framework.
00:31:38Brunelleschi had designed ribs of grey sandstone
00:31:41to outline pure white walls
00:31:43and understandably resented what was presumably Cosimo's request
00:31:47to brighten up the effect with decorative details.
00:32:11For the first time in centuries,
00:32:13we are beginning to see what Donatello really intended.
00:32:30These large roundels over six feet across
00:32:33had to be modelled from a scaffolding straight onto the wall.
00:32:36The wet plaster, already coloured,
00:32:38was applied in layers starting from the background
00:32:41with separate strips laid on top
00:32:43to give an added three-dimensional effect.
00:32:50Details of architecture are cut into the quick-drying plaster
00:32:54with rulers and sharp knives.
00:32:58Seen in close-up, it's a virtuoso performance.
00:33:01The speed with which Donatello works across the design
00:33:05and smudges in a cloud is almost palpable.
00:33:12Nails were hammered in not quite flush with the surface
00:33:15so that the figures and details could be built up round them.
00:33:19Here and there, you can see where Donatello
00:33:22scratched in the background design before the plaster dries.
00:33:34Once again, he drives across the composition
00:33:37with diagonal lines of perspective
00:33:39and then with an extraordinarily modern sense of immediacy
00:33:42crops the action at the edges like a snapshot
00:33:45to thrust the whole scene into depth beyond the frame.
00:33:51Modelling in relief, as the sculptor Elizabeth Frink has found,
00:33:55poses particular problems of vision and technique.
00:33:59One of the reasons I find this is interesting doing a relief
00:34:01is working in clay, which I don't normally do.
00:34:04It's very much easier, in fact, doing a relief I find in clay
00:34:07because of its flexibility and you can push it around.
00:34:11And I see more and more the difficulties in making a relief.
00:34:14It's fantastically difficult to do,
00:34:16mainly because you're trying to get something in the round
00:34:18and in perspective.
00:34:21And one of the difficulties I'm finding at the moment
00:34:23is to stop my figures looking as though they've been flattened against the wall
00:34:29rather than growing into the landscape as they should be,
00:34:33as though they were actually in the round.
00:34:35And I think this is one of the major problems of doing a relief.
00:34:37But I am finding it very, very difficult, I must say.
00:34:42I'm trying to suggest a landscape here, which is one that I know very well.
00:34:47It's up above us on the hill where there's a large cross
00:34:51on top of an Iron Age fort.
00:34:54And I think that in Donatello's release,
00:34:56a lot of the backgrounds are beautifully and very lightly modelled
00:34:59and sketched in, which gives them a tremendous distance.
00:35:02But initially, here, I'm having the problem of making this man
00:35:07far enough away from the hill and not flattened against the landscape.
00:35:12So I will probably, in the end, have to set this right back even further
00:35:19and probably take the man down also.
00:35:24It's too much in, it's in too high relief.
00:35:32I think in a lot of his reliefs, one of the things I find the most, most beautiful
00:35:37are the delicate way which things in the background are just a strip of,
00:35:42a delicate strip of clay, so fine, whereas I'm just struggling now,
00:35:48trying to suggest a cross.
00:35:50But he just looks as though his hand just moved across the landscape.
00:35:55And so he just placed it there and never had to work on it,
00:35:58and I'm sure he didn't.
00:36:02I find him a much more interesting artist than Michelangelo
00:36:06because he has this immense sensitivity combined with terrific strength.
00:36:13Here we go.
00:36:58As Brunelleschi's great dome for Florence Cathedral began to near completion, commissions
00:37:03were being placed to adorn the interior.
00:37:06One of them was for two choir galleries in marble to be set above the doors of the twin
00:37:11sacristies.
00:37:13The first was ordered in 1431 from Luca della Rovia, an obscure young sculptor from the cathedral
00:37:20workshop whose first step to fame was this masterly frieze of choristers.
00:37:25With trumpets, tabers, lutes, psaltery and cymbals, they sing the verses of Psalm 150 unscribed
00:37:31above and below them, Laudate Dominum, praise ye the Lord.
00:37:58Just three years previously, this outdoor pulpit for the cathedral at Prato had been commissioned
00:38:04from Michelozzo and Donatello, and it may be that the young Luca della Robbia had been
00:38:09aware of this design, for this too has a gallery of rejoicing cherubs divided into panels.
00:38:17Donatello had dragged his feet infuriatingly over this commission.
00:38:20He'd even abandoned it for three whole years while he and Michelozzo went off to Rome, and
00:38:25his patrons had had to get Cosimo de' Medici to intervene personally to persuade him to finish
00:38:30it, and even then, he left most of the actual carving to assistance.
00:38:37Oddly evasive about this commission, he couldn't wait to begin his next.
00:38:41He'd received a new summons from Florence.
00:39:00It would be Donatello's answer to Luca della Robbia's choir gallery in the cathedral.
00:39:05But being better paid for it, he went for a more sumptuous and uninhibited effect, determined
00:39:10to outshine Luca panel for panel.
00:39:13He developed his outdoor pulpit design into a frieze of cavorting putty over 16 feet long
00:39:19and running continuously behind pairs of freestanding colonnettes.
00:39:23Let joy be unconfined and, for good measure, a background studded with mosaic to glint in
00:39:29the dim light of the cathedral.
00:39:31The calm and clarity of Luca are banished as Donatello's putty take up a wild, bacchic dance.
00:39:37MUSIC PLAYS
00:40:09Donatello's children often behave as if they've forgotten they're meant to be in church, and
00:40:14these ones are certainly brothers to a single, rather mysterious figure in bronze called
00:40:19the Attis Amorino.
00:40:30In his laughing face, there's something that beckons mischievously from a world not Christian
00:40:36but pagan.
00:40:37He dances on a snake.
00:40:41He has poppy heads at his belt, but no one knows for certain who or what he symbolizes.
00:41:11More lively children, this time looking down from a dizzy height at one of Donatello's
00:41:16most severe and classical compositions.
00:41:19It's his life-size sculpture of the Annunciation, carved in grey Tuscan sandstone for the Cavalcanti
00:41:26chapel in Santa Croce.
00:41:30He presents the scene in its architectural frame as on a stage, projecting the figures
00:41:35from their background in three-quarters relief within a space which in fact is quite shallow.
00:41:44But the sense of volume and movement catches this moment of drama as tellingly as a tableau vivant.
00:41:51The Virgin rises, startled and shy, but not unduly alarmed, as she draws back slightly to gaze down
00:42:00at the angel kneeling before her.
00:42:04Gestures, movements, as always with Donatello, touchingly human.
00:42:08But for once the faces themselves are idealized classical, like those of the Three Graces, a famous work of antiquity
00:42:16that he must have known in Siena.
00:42:18Christian theme, pagan source, once again subtly merge in his imagination.
00:42:32In 1443, Donatello had to abandon his studio in Florence.
00:42:38Cosimo began demolishing that part of the city to build his massive new palace.
00:42:42And as the temperamental sculptor was then 57, it could have been with a sense of justified grievance
00:42:48that he took off in that very same year northwards to Padua.
00:43:00Padua had recently come under the rule of Venice and was a seat of learning.
00:43:04It was in fact the university which leased Donatello this house,
00:43:08looking across to what was to be the focus of his activities for the next ten years,
00:43:13the great Basilica of St. Anthony.
00:43:16Buried in this church only two months before,
00:43:19had been a famous mercenary, captain general of the armies of Venice,
00:43:23Erasmo di Nani, nicknamed Gattamalata, the spotted cat.
00:43:28Donatello's ambition to make this sculpture may have brought him to Padua,
00:43:32but it wasn't the first he completed there,
00:43:34for in the great church itself his services were also being demanded.
00:43:46St. Anthony is the patron saint of pilgrims,
00:43:49and his Basilica here was for them a major shrine,
00:43:53known throughout the Catholic world simply as Il Santo.
00:43:56For the refurbishing of its interior,
00:43:59Donatello embarked on a life-size crucifix in bronze.
00:44:02As he and his men worked away in the heat of summer,
00:44:06the materials were carefully recorded.
00:44:10Owing against Donatello's account,
00:44:121444, 24th of January.
00:44:154 lira, 12 soldi, for 46 pounds of iron for an armature.
00:44:2119th of June, 21 lira for white wax for modelling the surface.
00:44:261st of July, 15 lira for wine.
00:44:37Donatello's modelling of the human body was to be criticised later on in the Renaissance as too lifelike,
00:44:43not classical enough.
00:44:45But to him, the marvel about classical sculpture had not been its idealism,
00:44:50but its revelation of anatomical truth.
00:44:53Truth need be no less noble for appearing almost unbearably real.
00:44:59But the effect must still have been a shock to people who'd always imagined the dead Christ as emaciated, angular,
00:45:06anguished, Gothic.
00:45:08With one work, Donatello had brought the Renaissance to northern Italy.
00:45:18The Santo had recently been enriched by an enormous bequest from a wealthy wool merchant for an entirely new altarpiece.
00:45:26The church authorities had been impressed by the great bronze crucifix,
00:45:30so they now commissioned Donatello to produce, for a new high altar, a whole complex of sculpture.
00:45:37Standing above it, almost life-size, six freestanding figures of saints,
00:45:42leading up to a central group of the Virgin and Child.
00:45:52Below them, a whole series of bronze reliefs, including symbols of the four evangelists.
00:45:59Supervising every detail of design, modelling, casting and polishing,
00:46:03Donatello emerges as one of the great entrepreneurs of the history of art.
00:46:07He ran a workshop with more than 20 assistants to produce 29 pieces of sculpture in four years,
00:46:13of which 16 are wholly from his own hand.
00:46:18One of these, on the back of the altar, is an entombment carved in stone.
00:46:23Into a claustrophobically tight space are packed eight figures around the body of Christ.
00:46:29The men lay it to rest with looks of stoic resignation.
00:46:33Behind them, the three Marys tear their hair and howl in anguish,
00:46:38like mynades in a bacchic rout on a Roman sarcophagus.
00:46:49By the 13th of June, 1448, after two years' work,
00:46:53most of the bronze reliefs and all seven of the freestanding statues had been cast,
00:46:58and a trial altar was prepared in wood to display them for St. Anthony's Day.
00:47:05Another two years, while the actual altar was built from the best and costliest materials.
00:47:11Alabaster, white and red marble from Firona, greyish nant stone,
00:47:15Donatello travelling to the quarries himself to choose them.
00:47:21And in June 1450, the sculptures were finally installed,
00:47:25again probably in time for St. Anthony's Day.
00:47:30But alas, Donatello's original high altar was demolished at the end of the 16th century,
00:47:35and no one made a record of its design.
00:47:38What we see today is a reconstruction of 1895, which is far from accurate.
00:47:43We know the great crucifix, for instance, hung elsewhere in the church.
00:47:50But the Virgin, crowned as Queen of Heaven, is rightly at the centre,
00:47:55holding her baby in front of her in what seems for Donatello a curiously formal pose.
00:48:01It's a device borrowed from Byzantine art,
00:48:04signifying that the child is shown symbolically in the Virgin's womb,
00:48:08but made visible as if by x-rays.
00:48:15The painter Montaigne was working in Padua at much this same time,
00:48:20and one altarpiece by him reflects how Donatello originally planned his.
00:48:26At the centre, the Virgin and Child enthroned, surrounded by saints,
00:48:30but all beneath a temple portico supported on columns.
00:48:35The saints are grouped as if in conversation, placed at angles to one another,
00:48:40but leading in towards the centre.
00:48:43Donatello's saints were probably grouped in the same way.
00:48:46What's no longer certain is if they've been placed in the right order.
00:48:54St. Francis, for instance, faces away from, not towards, the Virgin.
00:49:00He's not highly finished in detail, these figures had to register from a distance,
00:49:05but boldly and impressionistically modelled.
00:49:08And the troubled, compassionate face is as real as a portrait.
00:49:13It might even have been based on Cimabue's actual portrait in Assisi.
00:49:18Just as this early memory of St. Anthony and the basilica itself
00:49:22might have been a model for Donatello's interpretation of him.
00:49:29Below these figures, on the front and sides of the altar,
00:49:32are bronze reliefs with stories from St. Anthony's life,
00:49:36designed to be seen much closer to the sumptuous architecture
00:49:39picked out with gilding and silvering,
00:49:42the scenes themselves alive with detailed action.
00:49:48Within a set of amazingly varied spaces,
00:49:51each barely more than three feet across,
00:49:54Donatello manoeuvres the crowds like a director in a theatre.
00:50:00It could be that popular theatre was in fact his inspiration.
00:50:04Mystery plays must have been performed in much this same atmosphere
00:50:08of excited audience participation,
00:50:11as they acted out stories of strange marvels and wondrous happenings,
00:50:15like that of the mule which knelt in homage to the host
00:50:18when St. Anthony was celebrating Mass.
00:50:28In another magnificent setting, another popular folktale,
00:50:32The Miracle of the Miser's Heart.
00:50:35But a folktale ennobled and raised to a grander level of spiritual experience,
00:50:40as Donatello gives rein to his imagination in vista upon vista
00:50:44of architectural fantasy.
00:50:54The sheer stage management is masterly,
00:50:57and one wonders how he worked out such complex and crowded designs.
00:51:04Only one drawing certainly by him survives,
00:51:07but he must have made hundreds of studies like this throughout his life,
00:51:11of fragmentary groups of figures.
00:51:14From these, he'd have moved on to sketch modelling in wax,
00:51:18and sometimes he'd have cast that sketch in terracotta as here.
00:51:22Traces of wax have actually been found on its surface.
00:51:25But wax is impermanent.
00:51:28A cast would preserve the rough idea for showing perhaps to a prospective patron.
00:51:38These two panels for a flagellation and a crucifixion
00:51:42must have been made around the same time as the bronze reliefs for Padua.
00:51:48They're as near as we'll ever get to one of Donatello's original wax sketches.
00:52:03Of the force and Anthony reliefs in Padua,
00:52:06the most astonishing must be the healing of the irascible son.
00:52:10A boy had kicked his mother in a fit of rage,
00:52:13and then in penance cut off the offending foot.
00:52:16But St Anthony miraculously restores it.
00:52:20The story perhaps stirred in Donatello a certain fellow feeling.
00:52:23On one occasion he had himself smashed a bronze head to pieces
00:52:27when a patron failed to come up with the agreed price.
00:52:31But he hadn't had a St Anthony to put things to rights again quite so easily.
00:52:37He sets the scene under a blaze of light in an amazing outdoor stadium,
00:52:43just such a place as mystery plays were staged in.
00:52:46And he has spectators strategically placed along the rails
00:52:49for a virtuoso display of perspective.
00:52:55Rough surfaces break up and scatter the light,
00:52:58for in these reliefs with their touches of silver and gold,
00:53:02Donatello varies the luminosity within each scene
00:53:05like a painter as much as a sculptor.
00:53:17One sculptor who has studied these extraordinary panels
00:53:20with a particular interest in their technique of, as it were,
00:53:24modelling with light, is Henry Moore.
00:53:26I was trying to understand what it was in Donatello
00:53:34that I liked so much,
00:53:36and that I'd learnt to...
00:53:38and the change from an earlier assessment or appreciation.
00:53:44And I realised that the reliefs, particularly the late reliefs,
00:53:49which as a young sculptor I'd had a prejudice against reliefs,
00:53:54wanting to do only three-dimensional sculpture,
00:53:57I saw that he was using,
00:54:00whether he modelled them first when they were put into bronze,
00:54:03whether he modelled in wax or what, I don't know the technique for sure,
00:54:07but that when he wanted to get a dark,
00:54:12he pushed the clay in, if it was clay, soft or soft,
00:54:17or that when he wanted to have the light strike something,
00:54:22he brought it out.
00:54:24So there was this piece of paper by one side,
00:54:27and I began to draw one of the heads to try to understand myself
00:54:31how different the late reliefs are from the early ones,
00:54:36because I realised that in the late or middle reliefs even,
00:54:40that soon after his early reliefs,
00:54:44that he began to use the clay.
00:54:48He was using, in fact, this clay like a...
00:54:52I might use charcoal on paper,
00:54:55having a white paper where I put the charcoal,
00:54:58it's where I'm turning a thing away from the light,
00:55:01where I leave the charcoal off and have the white of the paper,
00:55:04it's turning a thing towards the light.
00:55:06And this, in fact, is how you draw by light and shade.
00:55:11And he was modelling by light and shade,
00:55:14and getting a pictorial effect, as a painter would do,
00:55:17but a painter who had an enormous understanding
00:55:22of draftsmanship, of three dimensions.
00:55:26And it made me realise how he exaggerated,
00:55:29how this eye goes further back than it would do in real life,
00:55:34how the thinness of the chin comes forward,
00:55:37how this side here is almost cut like an axe,
00:55:41to get all that catching the light
00:55:44and all this turned away from it,
00:55:45with the nose just catching the light.
00:55:47It's really drawing.
00:55:49It's really drawing in a...
00:55:51It's not doing a geometric copying of distances,
00:55:56as it would be in nature.
00:56:03You can see Donatello had a great inventive literary mind too,
00:56:09like Shakespeare.
00:56:12It's unbelievable what...
00:56:14what invention he shows in these reliefs.
00:56:17He could make a novel out of any one of these merely.
00:56:26This must have been one of the busiest periods of Donatello's life.
00:56:30While supervising all the work on the altar,
00:56:33he and his team of assistants were also involved
00:56:35with the equestrian bronze statue of Gatimalata.
00:56:39His first problem was a technical one, the horse itself.
00:56:43It's modelled on the famous bronze horses of St. Mark's in Venice,
00:56:47but they all stand with one forefoot off the ground.
00:56:51Donatello's rests its foot on a modern cannonball
00:56:54to stabilise the group.
00:56:56The great problem with statues of horses
00:56:59is the relative thinness of their legs,
00:57:01which have to support so much weight.
00:57:13Holding a commander's baton,
00:57:14the rider wears a fanciful version of Roman uniform,
00:57:18slightly at odds with the modern weapon at his side,
00:57:20a longsword.
00:57:22Roman also is the detailing on the armour and saddle,
00:57:26though they're not classically correct in a military context.
00:57:30The whole statue, in fact,
00:57:31is more an evocative tribute to a great reputation
00:57:34than in any sense a portrait.
00:57:36Even the head is imaginary.
00:57:39Gatimalata in the days of his glory,
00:57:41not the old soldier who'd recently died at the age of 70.
00:57:49The monument was, in fact, a private memorial paid for by the commander's family,
00:57:55and it stood in what was then a cemetery just opposite the sculptor's house.
00:58:01A depressing sight, so many memorials to the dead,
00:58:04when, like Donatello, you're 70 yourself, in poor health,
00:58:08and tired of the endless disputes over payment,
00:58:11both for the Gatimalata and for the bronzes in the basilica.
00:58:15As he said himself,
00:58:17in order not to die among the frogs of Padua,
00:58:20he'd be pleased to move on.
00:58:24By November 1454, he was back in his native Florence,
00:58:28renting a house and workshop near the cathedral.
00:58:32Where his old studio had stood ten years before,
00:58:35there was now the great palace just being completed by Michelotto,
00:58:39his former partner, for Cosimo de' Medici,
00:58:41a palace that was to house two of his most challenging sculptures.
00:58:48His courtyard conveyed the message of that specifically humanist culture
00:58:53sponsored by Medici rule,
00:58:54and round it were versions, greatly enlarged,
00:58:58of eight famous antique cameos,
00:59:00some from the Medici's own collections.
00:59:04Carved by Donatello's workshop,
00:59:06these roundels suggest that the intellectual program
00:59:09of the whole courtyard can best be understood
00:59:12in the light of neo-Platonist ideas.
00:59:14This, for example, is the triumph of Eros,
00:59:18the triumph of love.
00:59:22In the centre of that courtyard,
00:59:24where another statue now stands,
00:59:26there then stood Donatello's most celebrated but enigmatic sculpture,
00:59:30the bronze David.
00:59:34Nowadays it's high and dry in the Bargello Museum,
00:59:37and out of context its real meaning is all the more difficult to grasp.
00:59:41The near nudity, the sensuous interpretation of the lithe male body,
00:59:48the mood of dreamy contemplation,
00:59:51they've always seemed a very far cry from the Bible's image of David the Giant Killer,
00:59:57except, of course, that this is not a Bible illustration,
01:00:00but a poetic allegory.
01:00:21The figure derives from Greco-Roman statues of nude athletes,
01:00:26and it is indeed the first life-size nude statue of the Renaissance,
01:00:30if one excludes Donatello's own crucifix in Padua.
01:00:34It's an avant-garde work resulting from aesthetic and intellectual ideals
01:00:39shared between artist and patron,
01:00:41basically a private commission for a private palace.
01:00:45And the dead Goliath laid low by the slingshot in David's hand
01:00:49becomes then the death of what is base at the hands of what is beautiful.
01:00:59The Renaissance was too familiar with the writings of Plato
01:01:02to find anything puzzling about reading an image of male love
01:01:06as an allegory of heavenly love itself.
01:01:08Love, beauty, virtue, they were all symbols of a moral ideal.
01:01:15On Goliath's helmet, there's a relief, as in the courtyard,
01:01:19of the triumph of Eros.
01:01:20And a description of Eros in Plato's Symposium
01:01:23provides all the ideas which are not present in the Bible.
01:01:28Eros is young.
01:01:30Of a truth, he is the tenderest as well as the youngest,
01:01:33a flexible form in his grace.
01:01:36The beauty of his complexion is revealed by his habitation among the flowers.
01:01:42In the place of the flowers and scents, there he dwells.
01:01:51Donatello's David is not specifically mentioned in any document,
01:01:55but his accounts for 1456 do include a large amount of materials for bronze statuary,
01:02:01enough, it would seem, to have made the David as well as a second major bronze
01:02:06for the centre of a fountain in the palace garden.
01:02:09This was the awesome but magnificent Judith and Holofernes.
01:02:14Nowadays, it's housed in the Palazzo Vecchio, out of context, like the David.
01:02:23This second triumph of virtue over vice is both a pair to the David and a deliberate contrast.
01:02:31For this is the beauty of virtue in a heroic woman who seduced the enemy of Israel
01:02:36in order to get him drunk and kill him.
01:02:47Originally, an inscription below it ended,
01:02:49Behold the neck of pride severed by the hand of humility.
01:02:58Judith towers over her victim as if to sacrifice an animal.
01:03:03Not perhaps everyone's idea of humility,
01:03:06as she stands astride his shoulder and treads down his limp right hand with one sandaled foot.
01:03:17The oriental luxury of Holofernes' tent is suggested by the cushion beneath him,
01:03:23which doubles as a wineskin to recall his drunkenness.
01:03:27Its four tasseled corners would originally have spouted water into the basin below.
01:03:32Even on the pedestal, the evils of drink are underlined,
01:03:36as none too sober putty indulge themselves round the wine barrel.
01:03:46The way two such large figures are set on a triangular base is typical of Donatello's inventiveness with grouping.
01:03:54Totally distinct, they flow together in one monumental group
01:03:58which still maintains the dominance of one over the other.
01:04:08It's an exceptionally powerful work, and Judith's victory is not for the faint-hearted.
01:04:14Even so, the force of the image is fully intended to be read as the force of its model idea,
01:04:19the constant familiar imperative that good must triumph over wrong.
01:04:27Throughout this period, when Donatello was committed to so many major sculptures, his health was poor.
01:04:33It was his doctor who mentioned this roundel in his diary.
01:04:38I record that on the 27th of August, 1456, while I was treating Donatello, the singular and principal master in
01:04:46making figures of bronze and wood and terracotta,
01:04:49he, of his kindness, and in consideration of the medical treatment which I had given, and was giving him for
01:04:56his illness, gave me a roundel the size of a trencher,
01:05:00in which was sculpted the Virgin Mary with the child at her neck and two angels on each side, all
01:05:06of bronze.
01:05:11And on the reverse, it was hollowed out, so that molten glass could be cast onto it, and it would
01:05:17make the same figures as those on the other side.
01:05:22The doctor was Giovanni Cellini. Rich and successful, he had his portrait carved in the latest fashion that same year
01:05:30by Antonio Rossellino,
01:05:31as a marble bust looking like a Roman patrician.
01:05:35The doctor says he was given the roundel, not that it was made specially for him.
01:05:41Casting replicas in glass is no job for a doctor, but to a sculptor it was an appealing idea because
01:05:46it represented an extra source of income of a rather ingenious kind.
01:05:55Actually, casting replicas of Madonna's was a common commercial activity among the sculptor's workshops in Florence,
01:06:01though normally they were cast in plaster or clay rather than glass.
01:06:06Such images are rarely associated with Donatello because so few examples are actually documented to him.
01:06:14But this large Madonna and Child in gilded terracotta proves what a tender interpreter he could be of this most
01:06:22popular of subjects.
01:06:26It shows the same characteristics as the Collini roundel writ large, the same exquisitely featured virgin with the same long,
01:06:35delicate fingers.
01:06:37The Christ child, too, a very real, newly born baby, and evidently studied from life even to the anatomically correct
01:06:45elongation to the back of the skull.
01:06:56Tightly wrapped in swaddling clothes, he's propped up this time on a simple wooden chair like a doll before the
01:07:03gently reverential gaze of the young mother.
01:07:06Versions of this theme by Donatello were sometimes copied on tiny plaquettes of bronze for devotional use in the home,
01:07:14or else in cheaper materials like painted and gilded plaster.
01:07:19There are cast copies like this one from a street shrine in Verona.
01:07:24Was it a copy, then, that Charles Avery saw in Florence?
01:07:29Then look how it's excavated in here. I can get my finger right in behind and in here.
01:07:35So that couldn't have been cast.
01:07:36It couldn't be a press casting.
01:07:39Actually, down here, there's a gap between the Madonna's nose and the baby's face.
01:07:46Well, then they must be modelled.
01:07:48They're not even really modelled together at all.
01:07:51Yeah.
01:07:53Then over here in the foot-oh head, one is seeing all the marks of the tool on these wings.
01:07:58The hair has been picked out with different little drill marks of the eyes here.
01:08:05What do you think of the feet of the baby?
01:08:07All striated and carefully worked.
01:08:10Really?
01:08:11The little feet have those indented toenails, just like the one in the V&A,
01:08:17where the feet stick out at the end of the swaddling cones.
01:08:20Do you think it is the real thing?
01:08:23Yeah, I think it is. Absolutely.
01:08:27While he was up on his ladder, Charles Avery took these colour slides
01:08:31and later showed them to a group of specialists at a conference in Detroit.
01:08:35Everyone, including the Florentine experts, agreed with some excitement
01:08:39that the Madonna of the Via Pietra Piana must be an original Donatello.
01:08:53What's so often astonishing about Donatello is the sheer range of his human sympathy.
01:08:59It's at its most moving here in his portrait of one who had known Christ,
01:09:04had watched him die and spent the rest of her life in the desert.
01:09:07This is St. Mary Magdalene.
01:09:15The image shocks with its stark and terrible reality.
01:09:19It's not merely the ageing sculptor's threnody on old age itself.
01:09:24It's his witness to what life had taught him.
01:09:26This he had seen.
01:09:28This he knew and must tell of.
01:09:36She has starved herself to the bone.
01:09:39Her nakedness is covered only by her own long hair with which she had once wiped the feet of Christ.
01:09:46Donatello has built up this marvellous texture, first by carving into a tree trunk, then by adding pliable materials to
01:09:54model detail over the surface.
01:09:57Colour and gilding give the final touches of life itself.
01:10:02Cleaned and restored after the disastrous floods in Florence of 1966, the refinement of its detail can at last be
01:10:10properly appreciated.
01:10:11We can see now that Donatello stressed the blue eyes, the stunning golden hair, the fine bone structure of a
01:10:18creature who had once been glamorous.
01:10:26But the message is not despairing.
01:10:29The saint is subjected to deliberate hardship and starvation, that body which was originally an object of desire.
01:10:36And through tribulation her soul has been strengthened and ennobled.
01:10:42Donatello is one of the great tragic artists, yet his theme is again one of victory.
01:10:47The triumph of the human spirit over the flesh.
01:11:00Nevertheless, such a statue must have been like an affront to Florentine sensibilities.
01:11:05For in 1452 at the baptistry, Donatello's rival, Ghiberti, had unveiled his doors of paradise.
01:11:12They'd set new standards of harmonious and measured composition, less raw and emotional than Donatello's.
01:11:23He was finding it harder now to get work in Florence.
01:11:27Restless and depressed, he looked for patronage elsewhere.
01:11:31From the council records of Siena, an entry for 1457.
01:11:36Donatello has let it be known that he wishes to live and to die here, and to take on some
01:11:40outstanding masterpiece.
01:11:42For the honour of the city, the council should consider the most practical way this may be achieved.
01:11:49What he got from Siena was the commission for a life-size John the Baptist in the cathedral.
01:11:55Having to design it for a tall recess may have dictated the closed vertical form rather like the tree trunk
01:12:02of the Mary Magdalene,
01:12:03although this time he was again using bronze.
01:12:07But he no longer saw his tragic saints with the free and open gestures bronze would have allowed him.
01:12:16He delivered the statue in three separate sections, the legs, the torso and the head.
01:12:24But he was learning to bargain.
01:12:26Until the proper payment came through, he withheld the right forearm.
01:12:31And it was only botched on much later by someone else, and not even at the right angle.
01:12:44Nevertheless, he continued working in Siena, where he seems to have made elaborate preparations for a monumental pair of bronze
01:12:51cathedral doors.
01:12:53These would doubtless have embodied an impassioned critique of Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise.
01:12:59It's sometimes thought there may be a connection between that scheme and this bronze panel of the lamentation over the
01:13:06dead Christ.
01:13:16But one does wonder if the Sienese would really have appreciated such a hard-hitting narrative style as this.
01:13:32There are faults, too, in the casting of this panel, which encouraged someone to cut away parts of the background.
01:13:38After the perfection of the foundrymen at Padua, one can imagine the old man's frustration at such inexperienced craftsmanship.
01:13:46Whatever the reason, and in spite of much money spent on it, the scheme for the bronze doors lapsed, and
01:13:52Donatello left.
01:13:55The Sienese were merciless. They wanted him to refund the cost of the bed and feather bolster, which had figured
01:14:01so prominently in his favorable contract,
01:14:04let alone all the money they'd advanced him for materials totalling a hundred times his annual rent.
01:14:11To provide for the sculptor in his old age, Vasari tells us that the Medici gave him a farm near
01:14:17their country palace at Caffagiolo.
01:14:20At this, Donatello was overjoyed, thinking that he was thus more than secure from the danger of dying of hunger.
01:14:27But he had not held it a year before he gave it back, declaring that he refused to lose his
01:14:32peace of mind by having to think of household cares,
01:14:35and listened to the complaints of the peasant, either because the wind had unroofed his duff cut, or because his
01:14:42cattle had been seized by the commune for taxes,
01:14:44or even because a storm had robbed him of his wine and fruit.
01:14:49He was so bored and disgusted with all this that he would rather die of hunger than have to think
01:14:55of so many things.
01:14:58For this gift, as in so much else, the sculptor was indebted to Cosimo.
01:15:03He was a great friend to Donatello and to all the painters and sculptors, and since in his time the
01:15:09art of sculpture suffered some lack of employment,
01:15:12Cosimo, to prevent this happening to Donatello, commissioned him to make certain pulpits of bronze for San Lorenzo,
01:15:19and gave orders to his bank to allow him a fixed sum of money every week, enough for him and
01:15:24his four apprentices, and in this way he kept them.
01:15:30Sadly, this good friend and patron died in 1464, and two years later his scheme for pulpits in San Lorenzo
01:15:38was abandoned.
01:15:39Or so it seemed. They were erected, but not till 50 years later.
01:15:44Donatello's reliefs for them had merely been put into storage.
01:15:49Is there perhaps a connection between this last great commission for the Medici,
01:15:54and the disappearance of all Donatello's work for the doors of Siena Cathedral?
01:16:01Narrative reliefs like this of the crucifixion, other scenes leading up to the Passion of Christ,
01:16:07they seem close in style to what one might expect Donatello to have prepared for that previous abortive commission.
01:16:14He had, after all, worked for three years on reliefs for Siena.
01:16:18Is it possible he saw a chance to make use of them after all, for Cosimo, for a patron who
01:16:24would really appreciate them?
01:16:39The modelling is sometimes finely finished, sometimes left suggestively rough.
01:16:44Here and there you can still spot traces of the chisel.
01:16:48But there's no fumbling of a tired hand here.
01:16:52It's the speed and conciseness of a lifetime's experience.
01:16:55Donatello had spent 60 years mastering it, this tumultuous art of making figures and faces come to life,
01:17:02instinct with character and emotion.
01:17:14His imagination, even in old age, remains amazingly unorthodox, impatient, passionate,
01:17:21intensely personal, startlingly modern.
01:17:36On the back of the second pulpit is the horrific scene of the martyrdom of San Lorenzo, the church's patron,
01:17:42roasted to death on a gridiron, a scene vivid with Donatello's own special brand of violence.
01:17:52Across the whole composition plunges the relentless diagonal of the fork, holding the saint down on the hot iron by
01:17:59his neck.
01:18:04This panel actually carries a date, June the 15th, 1465.
01:18:13On the front of this same pulpit, three episodes that follow Christ's death and entombment
01:18:19are divided from each other by projecting buttresses.
01:18:26Christ visiting the lost souls in purgatory.
01:18:31Rising like a ghost in his shroud at the resurrection above the sleeping soldiers.
01:18:42And in his final appearance to the disciples at his ascension, bidding them farewell as he gives them his blessing.
01:18:51And in a curious mixture of idioms, the scenes are framed by playing putty, wild men and untamed horses,
01:18:58recalling classical images seen in Rome in Donatello's far-off youth.
01:19:05That the panels may not have been put together exactly as the sculptor planned them,
01:19:09can be guessed at by the clumsy fitting of the buttresses at the corners.
01:19:18But one effect is reserved for the visit to the tomb on Easter morning.
01:19:24Donatello's feeling for deep interior space.
01:19:27We seem to be following the three Marys into the very depths of the sepulchre.
01:19:39When Donatello reached the age of 80, he became so palsied that he could no longer work at all.
01:19:46He grew worse from day to day and gradually wasted away until he died on the 13th of December, 1466.
01:19:56He was buried in the church of San Lorenzo, near Cosimo's own tomb, as he himself had directed,
01:20:02so that just as he had always been near to Cosimo in spirit while alive,
01:20:06so his body might be near him in death.
01:20:15Donatello's death plunged into mourning the citizens and artists of Florence and all who knew him.
01:20:22Honouring him more after his death than they had while he lived,
01:20:25all the painters, architects, sculptors and goldsmiths, the whole city almost, took part in his funeral.
01:20:34The grave of Donatello is still visited to this day, every December, by the artists of Florence.
01:21:02The grave of Donatello is still there, king, and the people who have been here.
01:21:11The grave of Donatello is still there, and yet he has been waiting for his family to be here at
01:21:27night.
01:21:27The grave of Donatello is still there, and yet, he has been in time for his life.
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