Donatello: Sculptor

Donatello Sculptor is a magisterial, beautifully illustrated study of one of the world's greatest artists. Born in Florence in 1386, in modest circumstances, Donatello rose, through the force of his own genius, to become one of the founding fathers of the Italian Renaissance. When he died in 1466, he was buried at the side of his princely patron, Cosimo il Vecchio de' Medici - a telling measure of the artistic revolution that he had brought about.
The time for a fresh and authoritative appreciation of Donatello and his work is long overdue. Not since H. W. Janson's massive catalogue of 1957 has there been any comparable attempt to present the full range of Donatello's accomplishment. Donatello Sculptor is, moreover, not just a catalogue of the artist's works, but a fluently written, meticulously researched narrative, based on more than half a century of study by one of the world's outstanding scholars.
John Pope Hennessy published his first article on Donatello in 1949, and in the more than fifty years that have followed he has continued to write on, lecture about, look at, and puzzle over this most challenging of artists. "My intention," the author writes, "when I started working on this book, was to describe what is conventionally known as an artistic personality. But ineluctably the artistic personality became an individual. With Donatello the relation between art and life is very close. Without some sense of his creative intentions, in the context of the society in which he lived, his work cannot be understood. This is a monograph, but is also, in embryo, a biography."
In recent years many of Donatello's sculptures have been transformed by cleaning. As a result, the Donatello we see now is a different Donatello from the one discussed by earlier scholars. In this book cleaned sculptures are reproduced in their cleaned state. The once neglected stucco reliefs in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo radiate the majesty and the vividness they possessed in the fifteenth century. The Coscia monument in the Baptistry in Florence shines with its original gilt, and the great St. Mark from Or San Michele has reassumed its lifelike character. Donatello's wooden sculptures - the Baptist in Venice and the Magdalen in Florence - are presented here freed from the overpaint which previously covered them. This book will remain the standard work on Donatello for many years to come.