Donatello (c. 1386-1466)

He was a wool-carder's son who learned his trade at a goldsmith's bench, and he became the hinge of the Renaissance — the sculptor through whom the antique world passed back into living art. This is the biography of Donatello (c. 1386–1466): sixty years of work in marble, bronze, wood and stucco, framed by two Davids — the marble boy of 1408, still half Gothic, and the bronze David of the 1440s, the first freestanding nude since antiquity.

The film follows the whole arc: the apprenticeship in Ghiberti's bronze workshop; the guild street of Orsanmichele, where the St Mark and the St George taught statues to stand and to watch; the campanile prophets and the Zuccone, the bald prophet he carved while muttering "Speak, speak!"; the partnership with Michelozzo and the Feast of Herod's perspective in bronze; the Medici years — the Cantoria's dancing putti, the Cavalcanti Annunciation, and the bronze David in Cosimo's courtyard, a masterpiece with no surviving document to explain it; the Padua decade and the Gattamelata, the first great equestrian bronze since Rome; and the stark old age of the Judith, the wooden Magdalene, and the unfinished San Lorenzo pulpits. Throughout, the film keeps the documents and Vasari's wonderful anecdotes apart, and says which is which.

Donatello's works are public domain (the artist died in 1466). The modern photographs of the sculptures — which carry their photographers' own licences — are used via Wikimedia Commons: CC BY photographs by Sailko, Rufus46 and Zairon; CC BY-SA photographs by Sailko, Yair Haklai, MenkinAlRire, Rufus46 and Zairon; the Cantoria photograph, CC BY, by Erik Drost; CC0 photographs by RenArt88 and Bautsch; and public-domain vintage plates. Where a photograph shows a modern copy standing in an original's place — the Orsanmichele niches, the Judith in Piazza della Signoria, Ghiberti's doors — the caption says so. Three beats no photograph can cover — the goldsmith's bench, Vasari's Rome, the bronze foundry — are carried by generated illustrations, captioned as such on screen.

Narrated by Magnus. Part of the MProdYT artist biography series.

#Donatello #Renaissance #ArtHistory

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