DonatelloMagnoliaAPArtHistory

    

Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, also known as Donatello, was an early Renaissance Italian painter and sculptor from Florence. He was born in 1386, and died on the 13th of December, 1466. He never married and he seems to have been a man of simple tastes. Patrons often found him hard to deal with, and he  demanded a measure of artistic freedom.  His friends said that he was a connoisseur of ancient art. The inscriptions and signatures on his works are among the earliest examples of the revival of classical Roman lettering. He had a more detailed and wide-ranging knowledge of ancient sculpture than any other artist of his day. His work was inspired by ancient visual examples, which he often daringly transformed. The height of his career was in 1427 when he completed the Feast of Herod, on the Baptistery of the Siena Cathedral. He developed his own style of relief known as schiacciato ("flattened out"). This technique involved extremely shallow carving and utilized light and shadow to create the full pictorial scene. His work was most prevalent in Florence, Italy. His main Patron was the Medici Family, specifically Cosimo de Medici. His contemporaries respected and comended him. Michelangelo admired Donatello's illusions of space, and  copied Donatello's early works such as David, his statue of the seated John, and his Madonna upon the clouds. Raphael was affected by Donatello's later advances in composition, and made sketches of his Paduan reliefs. Vasari praised him most of all as pioneer of mannerism and the baroque style; and for his group of Judith and Holofernes.  Donatello's putti and his Cupids were chiefly praised and imitated. The later classical epochs did not esteem him; neither Goethe nor Stendhal mentions Donatello in their respective accounts of their Italian journeys. It was not until towards the close of the nineteenth century that the historians of art rediscovered him. Louis Courajod, Gottfried Semper, and Bode were amazed by the naturalness of his cathedral prophets. Rodin enthusiastically acknowledged him to have been the ancestor of his own impressionism. The powerful expressivity of his art made him the greatest sculptor of the early Renaissance.