SCalling me an “inventor of the Renaissance,” as Berlin advertises the first Donatello exhibition in Germany at the Gemäldegalerie am Kulturforum, would never have occurred to the fifteenth-century Florentine sculptor. It is true that Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi was born as the son of a wool comber in Florence, the capital of the Renaissance, in 1386, i.e. still in the fourteenth century of Dante and Petrarch. However, the first verifiable works do not begin until 1408, at a time when Giotto, Ghiberti or Brunelleschi had already created central works of the Renaissance. But given the overly grandiose subtitle. Without a doubt, Donatello is one of the greatest sculptors of Renaissance art, and an astounding ninety works from all over the world bear witness to this in Berlin. All the main works are there – and where they are fixed, like Judith in the Florentine Loggia dei Lanzi or the prophets in the cathedral, you can at least see echoes of them. But what not even Florence has: The magnificent teeming altar relief of the “Donkey Miracle” and the one meter eighty tall rood screen cross, both made of bronze, come from Padua Cathedral, where the artist worked from 1453 to 1454.
What distinguishes Donatello is his range of variation and his counter-intuitive handling of the respective sculptor’s material. He turns hard marble into seemingly weightless cloud stone, for example in what is actually known as the “Madonna of the Clouds” or in the background of the “Pazzi-Madonna” from 1422, on which the interior paneling, which should actually be made of wood, is replaced by the delicate bluish-grey veining of the used Carrara marble looks like an airy sfumato in a landscape that is wide open to the rear. The Greek perfectly cut nose of the Mother of God overlaps so sharply with the snub nose of the Christ Child, which can only be seen partially, that it appears thin and sharp as paper.
In general, the main work from Berlin looks like origami in marble, as Donatello uses the linear perspective he already masters to compress claustrophobically narrow spaces into the surface just as he needs it, which gives his reliefs the unflattering nickname “rilievo schiacciato”, “squashed flat screens”, entered. It is therefore an unrestricted three-dimensional plasticity that takes place in the medium of the two-dimensional relief – a hybrid form between sculpture and grisaille, i.e. tone-on-tone colored painting, as if he wanted to avoid any excessively large plastic elevation in the reliefs, to avoid sculpting to expand as such. And to Donatello’s deliberately compressed perspective: counting from the so-called zero level of the irritatingly cloudy marble background to the wafer-thin veil of Mary, which also overlaps a millimeter thin at its lower edge, there are seven extremely finely differentiated layers that the sculptor applied to the box relief, which is only a few centimeters thick carves. Only the mother’s head strongly overlaps the frame.
His figures go beyond any framework
Donatello’s figures always delimit the narrow pictorial space or the frames of the reliefs through gestures or through sheer physical presence. He meticulously differentiates the materiality of each individual pictorial element: the veil of the Mother of God appears to be really transparent and finely woven. Even the brows of the child on the shimmering baby fat are treated differently by the sculptor than the plucked eyebrows of the ideally beautiful “Florentine” Mother of God with her fine-pored skin. Haptics, the surface texture that can be felt by the eye, meant everything to Donatello.
