Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi, called Donatello, was the greatest sculptor of fifteenth century Europe and one of the most versatile and inventive artists who ever lived. This year marks the 600th anniversary of Donatello's birth, and as a result, during the last twelve months various international exhibitions, catalogues, films, and conferences, organized in the United States and in Europe, have provided opportunities for a reassessment of Donatello's masterful achievements in sculpture and a comparison of his works with those by his teachers, colleagues, rivals, and followers.
The debut of these activities celebrating Donatello's 600th anniversary was the major international exhibition and related catalogue entitled Italian Renaissance Sculpture in the Time of Donatello, presented at the Detroit Institute of Arts October 23, 1985, to January 5, 1986, and subsequently shown at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, February 22 to April 27, 1986. Organized by the author and an international team of specialists during a period of seven years of research and development, the exhibition assembled nearly 100 Renaissance drawings and sculptures in marble, bronze, terra-cotta, stucco, and even glass, by Donatello, his mentors (such as Lorenzo Ghiberti and Jacopo Della Quercia), and some of the talented Early Renaissance sculptors, such as Luca Della Robbia, Leon Battista Alberti, Vecchietta, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Antonio Rossellino, Desiderio da Settignano, Pollaiuolo, Bellano, and Bertoldo di Giovanni, whom he inspired to explore new techniques, sculptural materials, and subject matter. Although this exhibition focused on the period from 1400 to 1490, known as the Early Renaissance, a few sculptures from the sixteenth century, or High and Late Renaissance, were included to demonstrate Donatello's continuing influence. Even the work of the famed artist Michelangelo owed something to that of Donatello. As Giorgio Vasari, the sixteenth-century Florentine chronicler of Italian artists, stated in his biography of Donatello, "either the spirit of Donato [Donatello] worked in [Michelangelo] Buonarroti, or that of Buonarroti first acted in Donato."
Few artists have been so widely admired in their own lifetime or afterward as Donatello. Only a handful of sculptors in the past 500 years, such as Michelangelo, Bernini, Rodin, and, in our century, Picasso and Henry Moore, may be considered to have comparable stellar talent and reputation, but probably none of them influenced the course of modern sculpture as much as Donatello.
According to the artist's own statements, made in his tax records between 1427 and 1433, Donatello was born in Florence in 1386. (Although conflicting contemporaneous documents indicate he was born in 1390, or alternatively in 1383, the generally accepted date of his birth is 1386.) Between 1404 and 1407, Donatello is mentioned in other documents as working as an apprentice, then as an assistant training as a goldsmith in the studio of Lorenzo Ghiberti, the Florentine master goldsmith famous for creating, between 1401 and 1452, the two pairs of doors with superb bronze and gilt bronze relief's depicting scenes from the Old and New Testaments for the Baptistery in Florence. By 1406 Donatello was also active as a marble sculptor and had received payments for two statuettes of marble prophets commissioned for the Porta Della Mandorla of the Florence Cathedral (Duomo). In 1408-1409 Donatello began carving monumental marble sculpture, such as a marble David for the cycle of twelve prophets proposed for the buttresses of the exterior of the tribune of the cathedral. For a similar
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