The 15th-century Florentine sculptor Donatello is the most out of focus of famous artists. The more we learn about him, it seems, the less clear we are about who he was and why he mattered—even if everyone agrees that he mattered very much. Today, a massive exhibition devoted to Donatello, the first in 40 years, opens in Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi. The renowned specialist Francesco Caglioti has brought together 130 works from the artist’s 50-year career as well as from some of his emulators, aiming to give us not only a comprehensive view but something closer to a unified vision of Donatello and his importance for the art that followed him.
And yet, Donatello’s range of work is so various—in medium, in theme, in style, in basic sensibility—that the exhibition may actually bring home just how compellingly it does not hold together in any conventional sense. His production resists the consistency we expect in a great artist’s style, almost to the point of slipping the bonds of his time, perhaps the greatest feat an artist can perform. The 16th-century historian of art Giorgio Vasari, the first to attempt a comprehensive account of Donatello’s life and work, found himself unsure where to position him in his historical schema, “for he had in himself alone all the parts that are normally distributed one by one among many artists.”
