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      DONATELLO (Donato di Niccolo Bardi)

      (Florence, c. 1386–1466)

      Donatello, an Italian sculptor, was born in Florence, and received his initial training in a goldsmith’s workshop; he worked for a short time in Ghiberti’s studio. Too young to enter the competition for the baptistery gates in 1402, the young Donatello accompanied Brunelleschi when, in disappointment, he left Florence and went to Rome to study the remains of classical art. During this period Brunelleschi undertook his measurements of the Pantheon dome, which enabled him to construct the noble cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, while Donatello acquired his knowledge of classic forms and ornamentation. The two masters, each in his own sphere, were to become the leading spirits in the art movement of the fifteenth century.

      Back in Florence around 1405, he was entrusted with the important commissions for the marble David and for the colossal seated figure of St John the Evangelist. We find him next employed at Orsanmichele. Between 1412 and 1415, Donatello completed the St Peter, the St George and the St Mark.

      Between the completion of the niches for Orsanmichele and his second journey to Rome in 1433, Donatello was chiefly occupied with statuary work for the campanile and the cathedral. Among the marble statues for the campanile are the St John the Baptist, Habakkuk, the so-called “Il Zuccone” (Jonah?) and Jeremiah.

      During this period Donatello executed some work for the baptismal font at San Giovanni in Siena, which Jacopo della Quercia and his assistants had begun in 1416. The relief, Feast of Herod, already illustrates the power of dramatic narration and the skill of expressing depth of space by varying the treatment from plastic roundness to the finest stiacciato.

      In May 1434, Donatello was back in Florence and immediately signed a contract for the marble pulpit on the facade of the Prato cathedral, a veritable bacchanalian dance of half-nude putti, the forerunner of the “singing tribune” for the Florence cathedral, on which he worked intermittently from 1433 to 1440.

      But Donatello’s greatest achievement of his “classic period” is the bronze David, the first nude statue of the Renaissance, well-proportioned, superbly balanced, suggestive of Greek art in the simplification of form, and yet realistic, without any striving after ideal proportions.

      In 1443 Donatello was invited to Padua to undertake the decoration of the high altar of San Antonio. In that year the famous Condottiere Erasmo de’ Narni, known as Gattamelata, had died, and it was decided to honour his memory with an equestrian statue. This commission, and the reliefs and figures for the high altar, kept Donatello in Padua for ten years. The Gattamelata was finished and unveiled in 1453, a powerful and majestic work.

      Donatello spent the remaining years of his life in Florence.