'Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance': Once-in-a-Lifetime Show, Victoria & Albert London

'Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance – a once-in-a-lifetime show,' The Guardian, Feb. 5, 2023. Ed. - *V&A, London, Feb. 11 - June 11.

- The UK’s forthcoming Donatello exhibition will capture the Florentine artist’s revolutionary genius for perspective, male beauty &, above all, empathy. -

A startling figure has arrived in Britain: a man with a gathering frown, sleepless thoughts and a graze of stubble. His eyes are downcast, his domed forehead lowered. You would recognise him anywhere in the streets of his native Italy: the pensive intellectual, dark-eyed and ascetic, with a tousled black beard. Except that he is from the 15th century, and cast in gleaming gilded bronze. The original commission was for a medieval reliquary – an object to contain the remains of a saint, in this case the skull of San Rossore, a Roman soldier who converted to Christianity and was martyred for his faith.

But the sculptor, Donatello, exceeded every rule and convention. Not only did he imagine the saint as a once-living being, not an icon, but he created this staggering portrait of a real modern man in the active moment of thinking. The sensation of walking round this being as his aspect changes, as if to chime with his ever-moving thoughts, will be possible with an epochal show opening at the V&A on Saturday. "Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance" is the first substantial exhibition of the Florentine master’s art ever mounted in Britain. Anyone who has seen even a handful of the figures he made on every scale, and in every medium, all through Italy during his long and prolific career, knows this will be a show of pure amazement.

[Photo: Reliquary Bust of Saint Rossore by Donatello, c1422-25, pictured at the Louvre, Paris, in 2013. ‘A real modern man in the active moment of thinking’: Photo: Jacques Demarthon/AFP/Getty Images].

Donatello (c1386-1466) is the most revolutionary of all Italian sculptors. Born in Florence, the son of a wool carder, he was apprenticed to Lorenzo Ghiberti during the creation of the great bronze doors of the Baptistery. Donatello’s most famous figure is probably the young David in black bronze, the first standing male nude in Renaissance art, got up in nothing but a swagger hat and boots. Outstandingly seductive, in all his lithe beauty, this David was made to be seen in the round by everyone passing through a Medici palace courtyard. He came to symbolise political bravery against tyrannical giants.

The London show will open with a greater David, however. Larger than life, and carved out of marble, this youth rises above you with a balletic sway, amaranth leaves threaded through his curls, head self-consciously tilted as if posing for a camera. The stance is all grace, the torsion amazing as you circle the figure, wondering how Donatello could turn stone into something as supple as warm skin & velvet. His chisel describes the exact tension of lacings through eyelets, the pooling of fluted silk, the long line of the thigh, the foot turned ever so gently upon the severed head of Goliath.. Donatello was industrious, prolific, long-lived. His figures are widely scattered all over Italy. So the V&A show is the chance of a lifetime, to bring Donatello into focus. -Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance is at the V&A, London, from 11 February to 11 June...- More, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/feb/05/donatello-sculpting-the-renaissance-v-and-a-london-victoria-and-albert-museum-a-once-in-a-lifetime-show
----------------

- *WATCH, 'Donatello, Inventor of the Renaissance' Exhibit, *BERLIN, Feb. - Aug. 2023.

- Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi (c. 1386 – 13 Dec. 1466), better known as Donatello was an Italian sculptor of the Renaissance period. Born in Florence, he studied classical sculpture and used this to develop a complete Renaissance style in sculpture. He spent time in other cities, and while there he worked on commissions and taught others; his periods in Rome, Padua, and Siena introduced to other parts of Italy his techniques, developed in the course of a long and productive career. Financed by Cosimo de' Medici, Donatello's David was the first freestanding nude male sculpture since antiquity...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donatello