Original subtitles

Good afternoon. I'd like to share with you this afternoon the work of Donatello and Luca

della Robbia, two of the great sculptors of the Renaissance. It'll be the early work of

Donatello. We'll divide him into two parts, and it'll be all I'll have time to do with

Luca della Robbia, unfortunately. I'll begin with Donatello. Not merely the greatest Florentine

sculptor of the period, Donatello was arguably the most influential visual artist in Italy in the

15th century. I didn't say the greatest artist, but the most influential artist in Italy in that

century, and he has remained one of the most admired figures in the history of Western art.

We know very little about his personal life. The range of expression that emerges from his art

is nonetheless remarkable. He can be heroic, stern, sensual, enigmatic. He can create striking emblems

of power and deeply moving representations of religious subjects. The individuality of the

heads that Donatello models suggests their intellect, and his ability to render the figure in motion,

whether measured or violent, convinces us that they are of our world. All this is part of the new

humanism of the Renaissance, and is in marked contrast to the stylizations and the generalizations

of medieval art. He conveyed the full measure of man, sometimes impressively noble, sometimes

pathetically vulnerable. In this lecture, I want to trace his career until he moved to Padua in 1443,

essentially the early part of his career. And when he moved to Padua, he remained for 10 years. We

were born in 1386. He died in 1466. He was apprenticed with Ghiberti, and he worked with Ghiberti on the

preparation of the North Doors for the baptistry, but he is of a completely different artistic temperament,

though he had much to teach Ghiberti, I might add. Let me show you. You are looking at Or San Michele.

We saw Or San Michele in two fleeting moments in earlier lectures. One was the interior, showing

the Gothic interior of Or San Michele, with a Madonna by Andrea Orcagna. And the second was a view,

in a view of Florence, a long view of Florence, in which we saw the square elevation of Or San Michele

rising above the general skyline considerably, about midway between the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio.

I explained to you, I think, that the name of Or San Michele means Garden of Saint Michael. It's short

for Orto di San Michele. This building, which you see on the street here, the tall building down on

the right of the street, the tallest building in the image, originally had open lodges on the ground

floor. And those open lodges housed a grain market. They were later closed in. A church was developed

inside, which was maintained by the powerful trade guilds, the very powerful trade guilds,

in the city of Florence. Let me show you a close-up. The close-up shows you some of the niches

in the building and the exterior, which were designed to hold sculpture. The exterior became

one of the most important areas of artistic activity in Florence. The various guilds commissioned

sculptors to fill the Gothic niches on the facade. As a matter of fact, they were ordered to do so by the

city fathers. This was not just a guild project, it was a civic project as well.

Donatello produced, famously, his St. George, about 1415, for a niche on Orto di San Michele.

St. George is no longer there. A copy is. It was finally moved into the Bargello, which is the

National Sculpture Museum in Florence, and moved there for its protection after long exposure to the

elements. It has also below it a relief sculpture of St. George and the Dragon, St. George fighting the

Dragon, which was also moved, after much exposure to the weather, moved into the museum.

This is the great single work of Donatello's early career. It is carved in marble.

It was commissioned by the Armorer's Guild. The individual guilds controlled individual niches,

as it were, for sculpture. And they commissioned things which were appropriate. And obviously,

the Armorer's Guild very aptly chose the warrior figure of St. George to represent them, and Donatello

was commissioned to carve it, as well as the relief, which I mentioned and will show you.

Possibly begun around 1410. This statue was completed by 1415. The heroic appearance of the figure was

immediately striking and immediately famous in the city, as was what Vasari called its marvelous

suggestion of life bursting out of the stone. That's a quality very, very rare in late Gothic sculpture,

but became a hallmark of Renaissance sculpture, and particularly one has to say of the work of

Donatello. The widespread legs of the figure, the central axis of the shield, lead us up to the

to the head, the vigilant, intelligent head, a thinking head. It's the most extraordinary thing

that Donatello has achieved. We take it far too much for granted that he has been able to give the power

of thought to the head of George. They figure, of course, in that pose, a very narrow, tall triangle or

pyramid accented further by the shield which he holds and the strong vertical axis that that has.

It gives it tremendous strength. Notice how everything is kept within the outlines of the body.

The arms don't project. Nothing projects into space. All of the strength is conveyed by closing the

contours, and all of the energy is kept within the contours of the body. That columnar neck is part of

the part of the culmination of this upward movement toward that extraordinary head. Originally, and this

is hard to imagine, it was crowned by a real helmet. Yes, and it held a real sword, both of them fashioned by

the Armorer's Guild. The sword, I think, would have been nice. The helmet, I'm glad, is gone, frankly. I think it

would have obscured something of the greatness of that head. The relief sculpture which went under it,

and which is now in the Bargello as well, is this remarkable, remarkable piece, St. George Slaying the

Dragon. It was done after the sculpture, done between 1415 and 1417. It is as remarkable in its pictorial

subtlety, as the statue is remarkable in its volumetric boldness. The extremely shallow carving, especially in

the background with an arcade and a landscape on the right-hand side, is called Rilievo Schiacciato in Italian.

Rilievo Schiacciato, flattened relief. It has no precedent. He invented it, and it's an extraordinary

invention. It is Donatello's means of emulating effects of light and atmosphere in sculpture,

in marble sculpture in this case, and is still impressive after all of the erosion that it

suffered. The subtlety is still quite remarkable. You see the princess whom he is saving standing on

the right side, and Donatello fighting the, Donatello, yes, the St. George, pardon me, fighting the dragon in

the middle, still has retained a great deal of its subtlety. I should add that this is akin to a predella

piece under an altar. It's about the same thing, and it corresponds to the main figure in the same

way that a predella panel under a saint frequently does. The influence of this invention of Donatello's

we've already seen on Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise in the baptistry. It was from here that Ghiberti learned

how to model his own wonderfully atmospheric relief sculptures. In the mid-1420s, Donatello was at work

on two projects. Statues of prophets for the Campanile, the bell tower, which I pointed out to

you beside the cathedral, and a relief sculpture for the baptismal font of the cathedral of Siena,

our first move out of town with an artist, I think. Donatello produced this figure of

Jeremiah as one of those figures of the prophets that would go on the on the Duomo. This is a project

that went on for some 20 years. There were a series of prophets to be placed high above the ground in

niches very far up, 30 feet up or so, and which made them very hard to read, and so he had to

to take that into account. The Campanile, as I remind you, was designed by Giotto 100 years before that.

The statues have been removed from their niches, again, to preserve them about 60 years ago, and

they've been placed in the Opera del Duomo. They are replaced by copies, so you can see how they would

have appeared, and it really is the only way, because when you look at the Jeremiah, the so-called

Jeremiah, because we've lost the actual identity of all of them. We're not labeled, as it were, and no

document tells us clearly who the saints were. So this has become a game, and tradition has this one

as Jeremiah. Certainly he has the gravity of some of the prophets, and the prophet Jeremiah certainly

comes to mind. The Jeremiah, between 1427 and 1435 approximately, is very voluminous in the drapery.

The drapery just fills out the lower part of the figure, and his head is large-featured. All of this

is to project 30 feet down to the viewer, and when you're standing right in front of it, as this image

does, you don't understand the proper effect of it. It seems possibly out of proportion, but you certainly

don't understand what it was meant to do to carry such a great distance, and therefore to have large,

generalized, voluminous forms, and large, large expressive features as well.

He did something else in these, in these prophets. He was inspired by the realism of Roman portrait busts,

and he infuses his prophets' features with something of that realism, but he also adds a potent emotionalism,

which is quite appropriate to the words of the Old Testament figures.

Let me show you the relief that I mentioned, which is in Siena. Siena is, I regret to say,

badly represented by me in these lectures of necessity, and I regret it, but I just couldn't

get out of Florence. However, in this case, Donatello left Florence for me. The Siena Cathedral

authorities commissioned for the font, the baptismal font, six bronze reliefs from four different

sculptors, and they were assigned their subjects. And Donatello's assigned subject

was the Feast of Herod. He executed it about 1427, and it is still in the baptistry there. As you see,

it is a gilded bronze, gilded bronze relief. Now, as Ghiberti had done, he follows here the medieval

method of continuous narrative. That is to say, several episodes from the story are shown within the

same composition. But he organizes these episodes, he organizes them with linear perspective, which

he'd learned from Brunelleschi, whom he went to Rome with, and whom he, whom he, from whom he learned

the principles of one-point perspective. If you look at the receding lines on the floor tile, they're called

orthogonals, and we'll return to that, O-R-T-H-O-G-O-N-A-L-S, but we'll come back to it. The receding lines move

toward a single point known as the vanishing point, and that point is just above the center of the square

panel. If you follow, in other words, these lines on the floor, they're incomplete, but if you follow

them through, you end up at a place at about the eye level of the bronze figures here. Now,

they're not the only lines that converge there, but it gets quite complex. If you look, for instance,

at these projecting posts from the architecture, they too are part of the perspective. You see,

if you follow the line, the foreshortened part of that, they too move down to the same central

spot. They're moving you down to the same general area, so it has that vanishing point. And the whole

of these various levels, because you've got a double arcade there with scenes of the Baptist,

including the first appearance of his head, and then a procession bringing it along in one space,

and then the second space, and finally brought to Herod. Now, Donatello has shown the dramatic climax

of the story when the head of John the Baptist is presented to Herod, causing the king and the others

to draw back in shock, as well they might, because the center, when an interesting thing happens here,

the center where the vanishing point is, is vacated. There's no figure in the center. The figures pull

away from the center on both sides, and that creates a tremendous tension between the geometric pull of the

perspective system going into the center of the picture, and the spasmodic actions of the figures

which pull away from it. This is using perspective, not just to create a spatial logic, but for emotional

effect. And this is extraordinarily important, and the great artists of the Renaissance do this

all the time. It's not a mathematical game. It is, it is a way also of injecting emotion or meaning

into a scene. This relief that we're looking at was the most consistent application of one-point

perspective up to this time, and we'll discuss the invention of perspective in more detail in the next lecture.

I should turn to, at this point, to Luca della Robbia, but before I do, I'm going to look back at the,

at the, at the relief and not let it go for a moment. There is such an extraordinary amount of

emotion in this that I think we should look at these figures in the foreground for a moment.

Here we have Herod shrinking back from the head which is presented on this platter, on this salver,

by the kneeling soldier, knight here in the foreground. And little children, sort of cherubs,

almost flee from the scene. What they're doing at the banquet is unclear. They flee from the scene to

the left and the figure draws back here. Herodias, I presume, seated here, is gesticulating with her

husband not to be so, not to be so timid about all of this. After all, she is behind this whole

event of the beheading of the Baptist. And the figure of Salome does a little dance over here on the

right-hand side. The, the work is such an extraordinary combination of drama, emotional storytelling,

and scientific creation of space. There's really nothing quite like it. And, and by the way,

it's from this that Ghiberti learns how to organize his spaces in the same way. Think of the relief that I

showed you of the two brothers and of that, uh, of that saga of Jacob and Esau and organizing it with, uh,

with architectural space. This, however, is much more consistently, uh, worked out than is Ghiberti's example.

Now, Luca della Robbia. He was born in 1400, died in 1482, and he is much too seldom recognized as one

of the great sculptors of his day, in large part because he's lumped together with the rest of that

extended family that went on for generations making glazed terracotta sculptures, uh, which were very

popular and which are often called della Robbia's. And these, these sculptures, um, uh, which he did make as

well, not just other members of the family. And his versions or his, uh, his examples of, of terracotta,

glazed terracotta, are splendid sculptor, sculptures, wonderful pieces. And you can recognize them once

you get a sense of his purity. Um, but his work in stone, his work as a sculptor in stone, is the true

mark of della Robbia's genius. We must content ourselves here with a close look at one of the great,

uh, great works of the Renaissance, his Cantoria, C-A-N-T-O-R-I-A, his Cantoria,

or singing gallery, if you wish, produced for the Florence Cathedral in direct competition

with Donatello. This is his memorable achievement. This view of it, we're looking up at it, it's now

of course removed from the cathedral and it's in the museum of the cathedral, the Museo dell'Opera del

Duomo. Uh, and you do see it high up on the wall, but there's no door under it to go into the, uh, into the

sacristy anymore. Uh, so you look at it and you see that, uh, he has, uh, he has arranged this

gallery in an interesting way. Uh, Cantoria, uh, is the word that I'm going to use, uh, but even

though we say it means singing gallery, musicians of all sorts obviously could gather on these

galleries, but they were functional, uh, functional galleries. The Donatello and Luca della Robbia, uh,

produced, uh, in this virtually head-to-head competition, two of the most beautiful sculptural

ensembles of the Renaissance. Now, della Robbia, as, uh, already asserted, is in fact one of the major

sculptors of the, of the Renaissance, and only space prevents me from showing you more than this

Cantoria. The Cantoria that we're looking at was made between 1431 and 1438, and it was his most

important commission to date. It is a marble gallery, 17 feet in length, which was placed over the door

to the left, which would be to say the north sacristy in the cathedral. Singers and instrumentalists

would have performed from this element- elegant perch. The decoration consists of 10 panels depicting

children as dancers, singers, and instrumentalists. Square panels on, uh, two levels, eight of them,

which we see from the front in two tiers, and then there's one rectangular panel on each end, which we can't see

in this view. The front panels are separated by pilasters, uh, and brackets on the, uh, three horizontal bands,

uh, specifically, uh, two stylobates and a frieze, uh, and, uh, on this, uh, is inscribed the text of Psalm 150,

which reads in part, Praise ye the Lord, Praise Him with timbrel and dance, Praise Him with stringed

instruments and organs, Praise Him upon the loud cymbals, Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.

I will show you details of the left panel on the top level, the trumpeters with dancers, and the panel

immediately below it, singing and dancing figures, and then I'll show you the left-hand end panel, which you

can't see here, singers popularly called, or properly called, really, Alleluia. Trumpeters,

wonderful. There are dancers as well, of course, under the trumpets, as it were. There's the great,

the great spread of three trumpets going across the, uh, across the, uh, stone panel, and the, and the figures here

are dancing underneath it. Uh, look at the, uh, puffed-out cheeks of the trumpeter. This kind of, uh,

very carefully and very, very directly observed reality is one of the things that makes the,

makes the, uh, canteria of Luca della Robbia so remarkably memorable. He sets up wonderful, uh,

uh, compositions within that. Uh, the three children dancing, the little triangulation of three children

dancing here within the, uh, uh, uh, the, uh, composition in the center of the composition is

quite wonderful. Singing and, uh, dancing boys. Uh, absolutely superb. Uh, the, the figures, uh, turning,

again, you have the feeling of a round dance. Think how shallow the space has to be. I don't know the

actual depth, but it can't be more than 10 or 11 inches. We're talking about carving out of a single

piece of stone here. Uh, and then you've, you've separated. Look at the legs below. Some of them are

absolutely three-dimensional, whereas legs in the background are part of the, uh, still a solid part

of the marble block. Um, there is a, a charm here which is just, uh, just extraordinary in these figures.

The sense of singing has never been better, uh, realized than, than Luca della Robbia does here.

Um, it is perhaps unlikely that the children singing in the gallery would have been mostly nude, or

in many cases, mostly nude. It's a lovely classical reference, and yet what you really feel here

is that he's looked at the kids in Florence, you know, that he has seen the children of Florence,

and that he has, uh, seen not only types, but individuals which he has recorded here. One of the most

wonderful images of the whole Renaissance is the next one, the so-called Alleluia. It's a

detail of it. It's, these figures are full length. Uh, these boys singing with the music scroll spread

out. What a wonderful device for unifying the composition, uh, of this panel. Look how low the

relief of the angel, the angel, I feel that they're angelic, of the boy at the upper left is, uh, emerging

out of the stone. That head just emerging out of it, mouth open, singing wonderfully. The effort that goes

into singing is also felt in some of these. Uh, look at the furrowed brow of this figure here.

This is not casual art. This is art in which he has really studied in a realistic way. It's

nothing to do with idealization, but with, with a, with a Renaissance realism, the activity of these

figures. And yet they're clothed in a way which is quite, which seems quite classical. When they're clothed,

uh, quite classical indeed. The unsurpassed charm and the complete evocation of youthful absorption

in music making is timeless. And Luca's skill at rendering the adolescent fleshiness and the, uh,

and suggesting contrasting personalities within these, among these boys never ceases to delight.

When Luca began carving his gallery, Donatello was in Rome, and upon his return was commissioned

for a complementary cantoria, which he made between 1433 and 1439 for the other sacristy door,

the south sacristy door. Uh, Donatello's cantoria is seen here. It too is now in the museum of the

cathedral. Even longer than Luca's gallery, it's nearly 19 feet long, it was completely different in

conception. Instead of single panels, Donatello created a continuous frieze of dancing children

placed against a mosaic background and behind five pairs of colonnettes on the upper level.

In addition, heavily elaborate decoration derived from his recent study of antiquities in Rome

is employed on the architectural surfaces of the gallery. Here is a head-on view, and you see that in

paired columns and behind them the, this, uh, this absolute melee of rushing, colliding children,

some of them winged, all of them belonging more to Roman mythology than to Florentine reality.

Let me show you a detail of the frieze. It is visual cacophony, but the compositional mastery is there. It's

not immediately apparent, but it's there. Look at the, uh, parallelism of these legs, these kicking legs

here and on the right hand side as well. And then within and behind, you see that there's a great

point-counterpoint of the design. It, uh, it can withstand a great deal of close study. Without

question, Donatello's is the more classical, more antique work, if you will. And equally without question,

I think, Luca's is the more irresistible of the two. Donatello's most famous work

is probably his Bronze David, created in the 1430s, but difficult to date more closely.

It's in the Bargello today, but it must have been a, uh, commissioned by the Medici because we know it

stood in a, the courtyard of the, a courtyard of their palace, uh, at one time. It's sometimes

academically summarized, and many of you will have heard this in an art history course at some point,

I have no doubt, as the first life-size, freestanding, fully in the round, nude statue,

sometimes they add bronze, since antiquity. Uh, you know, what, what, what is meaningful about that?

Well, in fact, it wouldn't matter much at all if the work didn't have much aesthetic merit. You would

just have a list of firsts without, uh, something you wanted to look at, but its aesthetic qualities are

apparent. Uh, the Bronze David is sensuously and elegantly modeled, incredibly beautifully modeled,

expressively posed, and superbly cast. Not an easy matter. The casting in Bronze here is remarkable.

David is shown after he has vanquished Goliath and decapitated him. The head lies beneath his left

foot. Let me show you the profile. Now, the profile view is a very classical face, a very classical head.

It has reminded some of the Roman sculptures, the various ones of Antinous, Hadrian's favorite,

uh, who is the only, who many sculptures were done of, of, of Antinous after his death, and they're the

only things in Roman antiquity that suggest, uh, what Donatello has made here. Uh, the strange hat. There's a

lot that is very strange about this. Why is he nude? That is not, uh, clear at all. Uh, although if he were

totally nude, it might seem obvious that he was borrowing the nudity of classical heroes for his

biblical hero, but the hat and the boots call attention to his nudity in a very unclassical

way. And they also call attention to the effeminate, androgynous appearance of the boy.

Now, it's very speculative, but there is some evidence that Donatello was homosexual,

and that the boy David with the head of the mature Goliath had a personal symbolic significance.

Uh, the great art historian and Donatello expert, uh, H.W. Janssen, uh, called him,

borrowing from Keats, um, Bel garçon sans merci, the beautiful boy, the beautiful pitiless boy.

Well, that's stretching perhaps a bit. Nonetheless, there is something here which is, in fact, um,

disturbing in a sense, uh, as, even as it is extraordinarily beautiful. And I suppose what is

seductive for one viewer may be disturbing for another. Uh, the front view, one more time,

what seems quite certain is that no similarly sensuous, seductive, strangely erotic sculpture

or painting had been created in Renaissance Florence before Donatello's David. It is

one of the most unforgettable creations of the Quattrocento. Thank you.