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Donatello di Niccolò

Donatello di Niccolò (Donato di Niccolò di Betto di
Bardi)(ca. 1386–1466)Florentine sculptor, influential
artist
Donato di Niccolò Bardi, called Donatello, was born
about 1386 in Florence. Little precise biographical
information has come down to us, although many anec-
dotes about him were preserved by Giorgio Vasari
(1511–74) in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters,
Sculptors, and Architects.Donatello was apprenticed to
Lorenzo GHIBERTI; in 1403, at the age of 17, Donatello
worked for his master on the famous bronze reliefs of the
doors of the Baptistery at Florence. By 1407 he had
moved on to the workshops of the cathedral.

EARLY WORK

One of Donatello’s earliest known works was the life-
sized marble David in the Bargello Museum in Florence
in 1408/9. It was intended to adorn the cathedral, but
around 1415 it was reworked and moved to the Palazzo
Vecchio, or town hall, as a symbol of the Florentine
republic. Donatello soon produced an original and
dynamic style in two works: the large marble figures of
Saints Mark and George and the Dragon in a niches on

The Gothic exterior of Sainte-Chapelle

and a seated Saint John the Evangelist (1415) for the
facade of the cathedral, now in the Museo dell’Opera.
He also did the famous low-relief of George killing
the dragon underneath the St. George. These figures
established his reputation. Between 1415 and 1435
Donatello and his pupils completed eight marble
prophets for niches in the campanile, or bell tower, of
the cathedral.

MID-CAREER

After this Donatello received many commissions, some
executed in collaboration with other artists. One unusual
work was the Marzocco, the symbolic lion representing
the Florentine state ordered in 1418 for the papal apart-
ments in the church of Santa Maria Novella. Donatello’s
optical ideas and vigorous low-relief sculpture reached a
high point in the gilded bronze Feast of Herodin 1427 for
the baptismal font in the Baptistery at the SIENAcathe-
dral. About 1425 Donatello entered into partnership with
Michelozzo di Bartolomeo (1396–1472), sculptor and
architect, with whom he produced the wall tomb of the
antipope John XXIII (r. 1410–15) in the Baptistery at Flo-
rence and the tomb of Cardinal Brancacci in Sant’ Angelo
a Nilo in Naples, both in 1427. Using marble and mosaic,
Donatello presented a classically inspired frieze of danc-
ing angels, or putti, for the singing gallery for the cathe-
dral in Florence. It was begun in 1433, completed in
1439, and installed in 1450.

LATER WORK

Donatello’s later work was heavily based on his study of
classical art, for example, the bronze David in the

Bargello, a boy clothed only in boots and a pointed hat,

who was probably the first freestanding nude since

antiquity. From 1443 to 1453 Donatello was in PADUA,

where he produced a bronze equestrian monument, the

first successfully cast since antiquity, of the Venetian

mercenary Gattamelata (1370–1443), for the Piazza del

Santo. Back in Florence soon thereafter, the aged

Donatello carved an expressive and strange statue,

almost romantic, of a penitent Mary Magdalene from

poplar wood for the Baptistery. In 1456 Donatello made

in bronze a statue of Judith cutting off the head of

Holofernes as a fountain for the courtyard of the MEDICI

Palace. Extremely influential, Donatello left two unfin-

ished bronze pulpits in San Lorenzo, Florence at his

death on December 13, 1466.

Further reading:Frederick Hartt, Donatello, Prophet

of Modern Vision(New York, 1973); H. W. Janson, The

Sculpture of Donatello,2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton

University Press, 1957–1963); R. W. Lightbown, Donatello

and Michelozzo: An Artistic Partnership and Its Patrons in

the Early Renaissance,2 vols. (London: H. Miller, 1980).

Donatello di Niccolò, 19th-century sculpture (Courtesy

Library of Congress)