Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance, V&A review — exhilarating glimpse of Florentine master

Reimagined for the sleek, glossy underground hangar of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Sainsbury Gallery, the tremendous touring Donatello retrospective arrives in London — the UK’s first show ever devoted to the artist — as a rather different beast from its initial iteration in Florence. Although smaller — about half the works by Donatello have come, plus many contextual pieces — it remains fascinating and revelatory, and the cultural repositioning itself is illuminating.

Only the virtuoso opening is the same: the larger than life marble “David”, all compressed energy, stands with the curl-framed head of Goliath at his feet. Carved in stone which imitates every texture — soft fabric against flesh, hard rock lodged in the giant’s forehead, delicate amaranth wreath — he looks at once real and archaic. Donatello was 22 when he conceived this sculpture for Florence’s cathedral in 1408. It ended up instead on Piazza della Signoria, a symbol of civic freedom. The shift from sacred to secular location was emblematic. Donatello, born into the medieval Gothic age, ushered in Renaissance humanism with his individualised, expressive figures: one of art’s foundational stories.

Florence’s grand, old-school show unfolded this historically, in a labyrinthine layout across two weathered palazzi between streets Donatello himself once trod. The V&A’s installation in a single bright, open-plan gallery is spectacular in another way — immersive, modern. Themes are foregrounded over biography, and the all-over jumble brings a vibrant sense of the clashing influences and currents shaping Donatello: classicism, Catholic piety, republicanism, the new science of perspective, traditional goldsmithing.

A dramatic row of portrait heads curving across the centre of the space, saints and sinners alike jostling for prominence, wonderfully recalls typical V&A fashion shows. The silver-plated “Reliquary Bust of San Rossore” is no idealised martyr but a character we might glimpse at a Florence coffee bar: animated face, dark eyes, tousled hair, furrowed brow, stubbled jawline, thoughtful downward gaze. So too the painted terracotta bust representing politician Niccolò da Uzzano, looking up suddenly, showing his strong aquiline nose and heavy eyelids. Every element is vivid, from the moles on his neck to the folds of his red gown.

Later comes the psychologically intense bronze “Head of a Bearded Man”, with flowing locks and eyes raised to heaven: it may depict a condottiere mercenary nicknamed Gattamelata (“honeyed cat”), or a biblical prophet, or a pagan river god.

Some of the most gripping, intricate pieces of theatre combine attenuated Gothic figures and metalwork with fresh, realistic representation, architectural perspective (Donatello was a pupil of Brunelleschi) and abstract patterning: the damascened bronze/copper reliefs “Crucifixion” enacted in a chiselled rocky landscape and “Miracle of the Mule”, framed by barrel-vaulted architecture; the tempestuous openwork “Lamentation over the Dead Christ”. Mary is collapsing, the Magdalene rushes forward with raised arms and dishevelled hair, St John withdraws in silent grief. This desperately emotive multi-figure frieze anticipates not only Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais” but Picasso’s distraught women in “Guernica”.

The freestanding sculptures are more purely classical; the highlight is the half-naked, laughing winged child “Attis Amorino” with his trousers down, curly pigtail, belt adorned with gilded poppy seedpods and snake winding around his sandals — inebriated as a wine god, mischievous as a Cupid, sexy, baffling, amusing.

His cousin sprites, joyous little “Spiritelli”, are bizarre fusions, derived from the pagan putto, adapted as celebratory figures associated with Christian baptism. “Spiritello with a Tambourine”, gleefully about to strike the instrument, and the graceful “Dancing Spiritello”, each balanced on cockle shells, were made for Siena Cathedral — their balletic movements inspired Botticelli’s “Primavera” — and are reunited here from collections in Florence and Berlin. A pair from Paris perch on candlesticks, as if about to take flight. In contrapposto pose astride a tortoise, “Winged Putto with a Fantastic Fish”, originally part of a fountain, stares out impudently.

Donatello, said Vasari, “took delight in all things, set his hand to doing everything, without considering whether it was insignificant or prestigious”. The V&A’s reduced-scale show gives full scope to the smaller pieces, their exhilarating detail, sometimes playful, sometimes condensing deep spiritual mystery into pocket-sized carvings.

Among Donatello’s signature shallow reliefs, rilievo stiacciato, partly carved, partly drawn in fine chiselled lines to achieve astonishingly dynamic effects of light on pale marble, the two luminous “sky” pieces appear together for the first time. “The Ascension with Christ giving the Keys to St Peter” has Mary, Apostles and angels interconnecting, overlapping, reacting, against a line of trees, diminishing in linear perspective to lead us to the city of Jerusalem, beneath clouds whipped by a breeze animating the entire scene. “Madonna of the Clouds” sets the still, watchful child and flowing figure of the Virgin in heaven: wind, airy atmosphere, flying angels are made permanent — eternal — in compact marble. Material, technique and meaning are inextricable.

Images of the Madonna and Child were a generic Gothic formula. In multiple and hybrid media — the painted terracotta “Madonna of the Apple”; the bronze relief “Chellini Madonna”, its outer side hollowed out for recasting; the Louvre’s “Piot Madonna”, the long-fingered terracotta Virgin encased within a tondo of wax medallions — Donatello revitalised the trope. Infusing it with tenderness and emotional nuance, he influenced painters’ and sculptors’ treatment of the motif for centuries.

With sumptuous draperies giving the bodies volume and warm presence, and the delicately incised faces, cheeks fused, held within a perspectival window, Berlin’s marble “Pazzi Madonna”, the show’s most beautiful work, perfectly balances abstraction and naturalism. Interestingly, it shares characteristics with the “Dudley Madonna” — the Virgin with wriggling baby on her lap, her gossamer dress and veil built in refined gradation of planes — which the V&A downgrades to a copy, possibly 19th-century. Florence however upholds the attribution for that and for others which the V&A demotes — notably the affecting scene of angels weeping over the dead Christ, “Imago Pietatis”, almost universally accepted as Donatello’s.

It’s an academic quarrel, but it seems to me that grouping these exquisite works with Victorian copies/pastiches — especially when Donatello’s most famous sculpture, the later, lithe, sensual bronze “David”, is here only in 19th-century plaster reproduction — is distorting, blurring true distinctions between master and imitator.

London’s show is called Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance — the artist as maker of forms. Berlin, the exhibition’s second venue, had Donatello: Inventor of the Renaissance and Florence simply Donatello: The Renaissance, thus asserting grander claims: that Donatello, as Francesco Caglioti, the curator who conceived the project put it, was not merely “shaper of an age on the level of Giotto, Raphael and Caravaggio, but . . . a phenomenon of rupture that introduced new ways of thinking, producing and experiencing art”. The V&A’s presentation brings us fantastically close to that phenomenon; there’s no need to play down genius.

To June 11, vam.ac.uk