Donatello Part 2

HABAKKUK

CAMPANILE, FLORENCE]

[Sidenote: Habbakuk and the Sense of Distance.]

We do not know much about Habbakuk. He left two or three pages of pa.s.sionate complaint against the iniquity of the land, but his "burden" lacks those outbursts of lyric poetry which are found in most of the other minor prophets. Donatello gives him the air of a thinker.

He holds a long scroll to which he points with his right hand while looking downward, towards the door of the Cathedral. It is a strong head, as full of character as the Jeremiah. But Habbakuk is less the man of action, and the deep lines about the mouth and across the forehead show rather the fruits of contemplation. There may be a note of scepticism in the face. But this Habbakuk is no ascetic, and there is much strength in reserve: his comment though acrid would be just.

The veins in the throat stand out like cords. They are much more noticeable in the photograph than when one sees the statue from the Piazza. It must be remembered that these figures on the Campanile are something like fifty-five feet from the ground: they were made for these lofty positions, and were carved accordingly. They show Donatello's sense of distance; the Zuccone shows his sense of light and shade, the Abraham his sense of proportion. Donatello had the advantage of making these figures for particular places; his sculpture was eminently adapted to the conditions under which it was to be seen.

In the vast majority of cases modern sculpture is made for undetermined positions, and is fortunate if it obtains a suitable _emplacement_. It seldom gets distance, light and proportion in harmony with the technical character of the carving. Donatello paid the greatest care to the relation between the location of the statue and its carving: his work consequently suffers enormously by removal: to change its position is to take away something given it by the master himself. The Judith looks mean beneath the Loggia de' Lanzi; the original of the St. George in the museum is less telling than the copy which has replaced it at Or San Michele. Photography is also apt to show too clearly certain exaggerations and violences deliberately calculated by Donatello to compensate for distance, as on the Campanile, or for darkness, as on the Cantoria. The reproductions, therefore, of those works not intended to be seen from close by must be judged with this reservation. The cla.s.sical sculptors seem to have been oblivious of this sense of distance. Cases have been quoted to show that they did realise it, such as the protruding forehead of Zeus or the deep-set eyes of the Vatican Medusa. These are accidents, or at best coincidences, for the sense of distance is not shown by merely giving prominence to one portion or feature of a face. In Roman art the band of relief on the Column of Trajan certainly gets slightly broader as the height increases: but the modification was half-hearted. It does not help one to see the carving, which at the summit is almost meaningless, while it only serves to diminish the apparent height of the column. So, too, in the triumphal arches of the Roman Emperors little attention was paid to the relative and varying att.i.tudes of the bas-reliefs. From Greek art the Parthenon Frieze gives a singular example of this unrealised law. When _in situ_ the frieze was only visible at a most acute angle and in a most unfavourable light: beyond the steps it vanished altogether, so one was obliged to stand among the columns to see it at all, and it was also necessary to look upwards almost perpendicularly. The frieze is nearly three feet four inches high and its upper part is carved in rather deeper relief than the base: but, even so, the extraordinary delicacy of this unique carving was utterly wasted, since the technical treatment of the marble was wholly unsuited to its _emplacement_. The amazing beauty of the sculpture and the unsurpa.s.sed skill of Phidias were never fully revealed until its home had been changed from Athens to Bloomsbury.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Alinari_

THE ZUCCONE

CAMPANILE, FLORENCE]

[Sidenote: The Zuccone, "Realism" and Nature.]

The Zuccone is one of the eternal mysteries of Italian art. What can have been Donatello's intention? Why give such prominence to this graceless type? Baldinucci called it St. Mark.[21] Others have been misled by the lettering on the plinth below the statue "David Rex": beneath the Jeremiah is "Salomon Rex."[22] These inscriptions belonged, of course, to the kings which made way for Donatello's prophets. The Zuccone must belong to the series of prophets; it is fruitless to speculate which. Cherichini may have inspired the portrait. Its ugliness is insuperable. It is not the vulgar ugliness of a caricature, nor is it the audacious embodiment of some hideous misshapen creature such as we find in Velasquez, in the Gobbo of Verona, or in the gargoyles of Notre Dame. There is no deformity about it, probably very little exaggeration. It is sheer uncompromising ugliness; rendered by the cavernous mouth, the blear eyes, the flaccid complexion, the unrelieved cranium--all carried to a logical conclusion in the sloping shoulders and the simian arms. But the Zuccone is not "revenged of nature": there is nothing to "induce contempt." On the other hand, indeed, there is a tinge of sadness and compa.s.sion, objective and subjective, which gives it a charm, even a fascination. _Tanto e bella_, says Bocchi, _tanto e vera, tanto e naturale_, that one gazes upon it in astonishment, wondering in truth why the statue does not speak![23] Bocchi's criticism cannot be improved. The problem has been obfuscated by the modern jargon of art.

Donatello has been charged with orgies of realism and so forth. There may be realism, but the term must be used with discretion: nowadays it generally connotes the ugly treatment of an ugly theme, and is applied less as a technical description than as a term of abuse.

Donatello was certainly no realist in the sense that an ideal was excluded, nor could he have been led by realism into servile imitation or the multiplication of realities. After a certain point the true ceases to be true, as n.o.body knew better than Barye, the greatest of the "realists." The Zuccone can be more fittingly described in Bocchi's words. It is the creation of a verist, of a naturalist, founded on a clear and intimate perception of nature. Donatello was pledged to no system, and his only canon, if such existed, was the canon of observation matured by technical ability. We have no reason to suppose that Donatello claimed to be a deep thinker. He did not spend his time, like Michael Angelo, in devising theories to explain the realms of art. He was without a.n.a.lytical pedantry, and, like his character, his work was nave and direct. Nor was he absorbed by appreciation of "beauty," abstract or concrete. If he saw a man with a humped back or a short leg he would have been prepared to make his portrait, a.s.suming that the ent.i.ty was not in conflict with the subject in hand. Hence the Zuccone. Its mesmeric ugliness is the effect of Donatello's gothic creed, and it well shows how Donatello, who from his earliest period was opposed to the conventions of the Pisan school, took the lead among those who founded their art upon the observation of nature. A later critic, shrewd and now much neglected, said that t.i.tian "contented himself with pure necessity, which is the simple imitation of nature."[24] One could not say quite so much of Donatello, in whom, curiously enough, the love of nature was limited to its human aspect. He seems to have been impervious to outdoor nature, to the world of plants and birds and beasts. Ghiberti, his contemporary, was a profound student of natural life in all its forms, and the famous bronze doors of the Baptistery are peopled with the most fanciful products of his observation. "I strove to imitate nature to the utmost degree," he says in his commentary.[25] Thus Ghiberti makes a bunch of grapes, and wanting a second bunch as _pendant_, he takes care to make it of a different species. The variety and richness of his fruit and flower decoration are extraordinary and, if possible, even more praiseworthy than the dainty garlands of the Della Robbia.

With Donatello all is different. He took no pleasure in enriching his sculpture in this way. The Angel of the Annunciation carries no lily; when in the Tabernacle of St. Peter's he had to decorate a pilaster he made lilies, but stiff and unreal. His trees in the landscape backgrounds of the Charge to Peter and the Release of Princess Sabra by St. George are tentative and ill-drawn. The children of the Cantoria, the great singing gallery made for the Cathedral, are dancing upon a ground strewn with flowers and fruit. The idea was charming, but in executing it Donatello could only make _cut_ flowers and withered fruit. There is no life in them, no savour, and the energy of the children seems to have exhausted the humbler form of vitality beneath their feet. Years afterwards, when Donatello's a.s.sistants were allowed a good deal of lat.i.tude, we find an effort to make more use of this invaluable decoration: the pulpits of San Lorenzo, for instance, have some trees and climbing weeds showing keen study of nature. But Donatello himself always preferred the architectural background, in contrast to Leonardo da Vinci, who, with all his love of building, seldom if ever used one in the backgrounds of his pictures: but then Leonardo was the most advanced botanist of his age.

[Footnote 21: Edition 1768, p. 74.]

[Footnote 22: _E.g._, Milanesi, Catalogo, 1887, p. 6.]

[Footnote 23: Cinelli's edition, 1677, p. 45.]

[Footnote 24: Raffaelle Mengs, Collected Works. London, 1796, I., p.

132.]

[Footnote 25: Printed in Vasari, Lemonnier Ed., 1846, vol. i.]

[Sidenote: The Zuccone and the Sense of Light and Shade.]

Speaking of the employment of light and shade as instruments in art, Cicero says: "_Multa vident pictores in umbris et in eminentia, quae nos non videmus_." One may apply the dictum to the Zuccone where Donatello has carved the head with a rugged boldness, leaving the play of light and shade to complete the portrait. Davanzati was explicit on the matter,[26] showing that the point of view from which the Zuccone was visible made this coa.r.s.e treatment imperative, if the spectator below was to see something forcible and impressive. "The eyes," he says, "are made as if they were dug out with a shovel: eyes which would appear lifelike on the ground level would look blind high up on the Campanile, for distance consumes diligence--_la lontananza si mangia la diligenzia_." The doctrine could not be better stated, and it governs the career of Donatello. There is nothing like the Zuccone in Greek art: nothing so ugly, nothing so wise. Cla.s.sical sculptors in statues destined for lofty situations preserved the absolute truth of form, but their diligence was consumed by distance. What was true in the studio lost its truth on a lofty pediment or frieze. They preserved accuracy of form, but they sacrificed accuracy of appearance; whereas relative truth was in reality far more important--until, indeed, the time comes when the lights and shades of the studio are reproduced in some art gallery or museum.

[Footnote 26: In Introduction to his translation of Tacitus.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Alinari_

ABRAHAM AND ISAAC

CAMPANILE, FLORENCE]

[Sidenote: Abraham and the Sense of Proportion.]

The statue of Abraham and Isaac on the east side of the Campanile is interesting as being the first group made by Donatello. The subject had already been treated by Brunellesco and Ghiberti in relief.

Donatello had to make his figures on a larger scale. Abraham is a tall, powerful man with a long flowing beard, looking upwards as he receives the command to sheath the dagger already touching the shoulder of his son. The naked boy is kneeling on his left leg and is modelled with a good deal of skill, though, broadly speaking, the treatment is rather archaic in character. It is a tragic scene, in which the contrast of the inexorable father and the resigned son is admirably felt. Donatello had to surmount a technical difficulty, that of putting two figures into a niche only intended for one. His sense of proportion enabled him to make a group in harmony with its position and environment. It _fits_ the niche. Statues are so often unsuited to their niches; scores of examples could be quoted from Milan Cathedral alone where the figures are too big or too small, or where the base slopes downwards and thus fails to give adequate support to the figure. There is an old tradition which ill.u.s.trates Donatello's apt.i.tude for grouping. Nanni di Banco had to put four martyrs into a niche of Or San Michele, and having made his statues found it impossible to get them in. Donatello was invoked, and by removing a superfluous bit of marble here, and knocking off an arm there, the four figures were successfully grouped together. The statues, it must be admitted, show no signs of such usage, and Nanni was a competent person: but the story would not have been invented unless Donatello had been credited in his own day with the reputation of being a master of proportion and grouping. Donatello, however, never really excelled in the free standing group. His idea was a suite or series of figures against a background, a bas-relief. The essential quality of a group is that there should be something to unite the figures. We find this in the Abraham, but the four martyrs by Nanni di Banco are standing close together as if by chance, and cannot properly be called a group in anything but juxtaposition of figures. Il Rosso helped to make Abraham. The commission was given jointly to the two sculptors in March 1421, and the statue was finished, with unusual expedition, by November of the same year. The hand of Rosso cannot be easily detected except in the drapery, which differs a good deal from Donatello's. The latter must have been chiefly responsible for the grouping and wholly so for the fine head of Abraham.

[Sidenote: Drapery and Hands.]

Rosso's drapery was apt to be treated in rather a small way with a number of little folds. Donatello, on the other hand, often tended to the opposite extreme, and in the Campanile figures we see the clothes hanging about the prophets in such ample lines that the Zuccone and Jeremiah are overweighted with togas which look like heavy blankets.

Habbakuk and the Baptist are much more skilfully draped, deference being shown to the anatomy. "To make drapery merely natural," said Sir Joshua Reynolds, "is a mechanical operation to which neither genius nor taste are required: whereas it requires the nicest judgment to dispose the drapery so that the folds have an easy communication, and gracefully follow each other with such natural negligence as to look like the effect of chance, and at the same time show the figure under it to the utmost advantage."[27] The sculptors of the fifteenth century did not find it so easy to make drapery look purely natural, and we are often confronted by cases where they failed in this respect. It arose partly from a belief that drapery was nothing more than an accessory, partly also from their ignorance of what was so fully realised by the Greeks, that there can be very little grace in a draped figure unless there are the elements of beauty below. Another comment suggested by Donatello's early work in marble is that he was not quite certain how to model or dispose the hands. They are often unduly big; Michael Angelo started with the same mistake: witness his David and the Madonna on the Stairs. It was a mistake soon rectified in either case. But till late in life Donatello never quite succeeded in giving nerve or occupation to his hands. St. Mark, St. Peter, and St. John all have a book in their left hands, but none of them _hold_ the book; it has no weight, the hand shows no grip and has no sense of possession. Neither did Donatello always know where to put the hands, giving them the shy and self-conscious positions affected by the schoolboy. The Bargello David is a case in point. His hands are idle, they have really nothing to do, and their position is arbitrary in consequence. It is all a descent from the Gothic, where we find much that is inharmonious and paradoxical, and a frequent lack of concord between the component parts. St. George, standing erect in his niche, holds the shield in front of him, its point resting on the ground.

But, notwithstanding the great progress made by Donatello in modelling these hands--(so much indeed that one might almost suspect the bigger hands of contemporary statues to be faithful portraits of bigger hands)--one feels that the shield does not owe its upright position to the constraint of the hands. They do not reflect the outward pressure of the heavy shield, which could almost be removed without making it necessary to modify their functions or position. It was reserved for Michael Angelo to achieve the unity of purpose and knowledge needed in portraying the human hand. He was the first among Italian sculptors to render the relation of the hand to the wrist, the wrist to the forearm, and thence to the shoulder and body. In the fifteenth century n.o.body fully understood the sequence of muscles which correlates every particle of the limb, and Donatello could not avoid the halting and inconclusive outcome of his inexperience.

[Footnote 27: Discourses, 1778, p. 116.]

[Sidenote: Minor Works for the Cathedral.]

There remain a few minor works for the Cathedral which require notice.

In October 1421 an unfinished figure by Ciuff.a.gni was handed over to Donatello and Il Rosso. It is probable that Dr. Semper is correct in thinking that this may be the statue on the East side of the Cathedral hitherto ascribed to Niccolo d'Arezzo, though it can hardly be the missing Joshua. We have here a middle-aged man with a long beard, his head inclined forward and supported by his upraised hand with its forefinger extended. Donatello was fond of youth, but not less of middle age. With all their power these prophets are middle-aged men who would walk slowly and whose gesture would be fraught with mature dignity. Donatello did not limit to the very young or the very old the privilege of seeing visions and dreaming dreams. Two other statues by Donatello have perished. These are Colossi,[28] ordered probably between 1420 and 1425, and made of brick covered with stucco or some other kind of plaster. They stood outside the church, on the b.u.t.tress pillars between the apsidal chapels. One of them was on the north side, as an early description mentions the "_Gigante sopra la Annuntiata_,"[29] that is above the Annunciation on the Mandorla door.

The perishable material of these statues was selected, no doubt, owing to the difficulty and expense of securing huge monoliths of marble. In this case one must regret their loss, as the distance from which they would be seen would amply justify their heroic dimensions. But the idea of Colossi, which originated in Egypt and the East, is to astonish, and to make the impression through the agency of bulk. The David by Michael Angelo is great in spite of its unwieldiness. Michael Angelo himself was under no illusions about these Colossi. His letter criticising the proposal to erect a colossal statue of the Pope on the Piazza of San Lorenzo is in itself a delightful piece of humour, and ridiculed the conceit with such pungency that the project was abandoned. Finally, Donatello made two busts of prophets for the Mandorla door. The commission is previous to May 1422, when it is noted that Donatello was to receive six golden florins for his work.

They are profile heads carved in relief upon triangular pieces of marble, which fill two congested architectural corners. They look like the result of a whim, and at first sight one would think they were ordered late in the history of the door to supplement or replace something unsatisfactory. But this is not the case. Half corbel and half decoration, they are curious things: one shows a young man, the other an older bearded man. Both have long hair drawn back by a fillet, and in each case one hand is placed across the breast. They have quite a cla.s.sical look, and are the least interesting as well as the least noticeable of the numerous sculptures made for the Cathedral by Donatello. The Domopera evidently appreciated his talent. To this day, besides these busts and the two small prophets, there survive at least nine marble figures made for the Duomo, some of them well over life size. There were also the Colossi, and it will be seen later on that the Domopera gave him further commissions for bronze doors, Cantoria, altar and stained gla.s.s; he also was employed as an architectural expert. Years of Donatello's life were spent on the embellishment of Santa Maria del Fiore, a gigantic task which he shared with his greatest predecessors and his most able contemporaries. The task, indeed, was never fully accomplished. The Campanile is not crowned by the spire destined for it by Giotto: the facade has perished and the interior is marred by the errors of subsequent generations. But the Cathedral of Florence must nevertheless take high rank among the most stately churches of Christendom.

[Footnote 28: They were standing as late as 1768. Baldinucci, p. 79.]

[Footnote 29: Memoriale, 1510.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Alinari_

ST. MARK

OR SAN MICHELE]

[Sidenote: Or San Michele, St. Peter and St. Mark.]

From the earliest times there used to be a church dedicated to St.

Michael, which stood within the _orto_, the garden named after the saint. The church was, however, removed in the thirteenth century and was replaced by an open _loggia_, which was used for a corn market and store. In the following century the open arches of the _loggia_ were built up, again making a church of the building, in which a venerated Madonna, for which Orcagna made the tabernacle, was preserved. The companies and merchant guilds of Florence undertook to present statues to decorate the external niches of the building. Besides Donatello, Ghiberti, Verrocchio, Gian Bologna and Nanni di Banco were employed; and there are also some admirable medallions by Luca della Robbia.

Donatello made four statues--St. Peter, St. Mark, St. Louis and St.

George. He was to have made St. Phillip as well, but the shoemakers who ordered the statue could not afford to pay Donatello's price and the work was entrusted to Nanni di Banco. Two only of Donatello's statues are left at Or San Michele, the St. Louis being now in Santa Croce, while the St. George has been placed in the Bargello. All these statues were put into niches of which the base is not more than eight feet from the ground, and being intended to be seen at a short distance are carved with greater attention to detail and finish than is the case with the prophets on the Campanile. St. Peter is probably the earliest in date, having been made, judging from stylistic grounds, between 1407 and 1412. This statue shows a doubt and hesitation which did not affect Donatello when making the little prophets for the Mandorla door. The head is commonplace and inexpressive; the pose is dull, and the drapery with its crimped edges ignores the right leg. There is, however, nothing blameworthy in the statue, but, on the other hand, there is nothing showing promise or deserving praise. Had it been made by one of the _macchinisti_ of the time it would have lived in decent obscurity without provoking comment. In fact the statue does not owe its appearance in critical discussions to its own merits, but to the later achievement of the sculptor. Thus only can one explain Bocchi's opinion that "living man could not display truer deportment than we find in the St. Peter."[30]