We got back to Bradford yesterday after one of our periodic “raids on London”. One of my “trophies” was the current Donatello exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was a startling experience, in a way I was certainly not expecting.
In the contemporary world we place an enormous weight, in evaluating a work of art, on its originality. Above all, however, we have come to expect that an original work will be the work of the person whose name is attached to it. A widely repeated taunt by David Hockney, directed at Damien Hurst, is that his work is “made by hand”, by Hockney himself, whereas Hurst relies heavily upon people working under his direction. It was quite startling, however, to realise that back in the early fifteenth century things were regarded rather differently. Work that was unquestionably the product of Donatello, and him alone, is really very rare indeed, but his influence (upon which his reputation is built) extended well beyond that narrow limit.
For a start, Donatello was a very productive draftsman, who either passed this work to pupils to be executed, or who gave his designs to colleagues, with the result that on occasions there are several versions of the same piece in existence in which it is by no means clear just how much of it was actually made by the master. Evidently he worked closely with colleagues, such as Michelozzo or Beltramino, and nobody can be very sure who should be regarded as “the artist”, on some occasions. The extent to which it was readily possibly to produce copies of work by a master was illustrated by two fascinating films, in which contemporary artists making a terra cotta panel and a marble element for a frieze, using original tools and his designs, produced before our eyes “Donatellos”. On more than one occasion items were grouped as examples of a common motif, “after a design by ….”. Clearly Donatello was enormously influential in sculpture, architecture and portraiture (and also, to my surprise, jewellery) and the paucity of pieces of work which were without any doubt or qualification by the master’s hand alone didn’t detract from that in any way.
There was one aspect of his originality which did catch my attention, and that was his capacity to imagine familiar figures in a novel way. His spiritelli (cherubs) were real children: the several versions of the “Virgin of Humility” left no doubt about the real humanity of the figures depicted. Above all, his John the Baptist was a youthful rebel, with even a trace of doubt in his face at the moment when he catches sight of the Christ.