Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance review – a ‘first-rate exhibition’

Donatello (c.1386-1466) was “the most revolutionary of all Italian sculptors”, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. “Industrious”, “prolific” and long-lived, the Florence-born master is credited with almost single-handedly creating the sculptural aesthetic of the Italian Renaissance and paving the way for Michelangelo.

“Donatello’s most famous figure is probably the young David in black bronze, the first standing male nude in Renaissance art.” Like no one before him, he “could turn stone into something as supple as warm skin and velvet”, creating “some of the strangest sculptures in art” – “outlandish hybrids of ancient and modern” that fused medieval Catholic imagery with any number of tricks borrowed from classical tradition.

This month, the V&A opened “the first substantial exhibition” of his art ever mounted in Britain, a show that promises to be an “epochal” event. Bringing together a wealth of key sculptures created in a wide range of materials, from marble to bronze to wood, as well as examples of work by Donatello’s followers and contemporaries, it explores the entirety of his trailblazing career. For any art lover, it represents “the chance of a lifetime”.

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By any standard, this is a “first-rate exhibition”, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Highlights abound: we see an early marble sculpture of David on loan from Florence; “a finger-sucking Christ practically fused with his mother”; and, the “star turn” here, a “notoriously peculiar” bronze of a dancing cherub known as the Attis-Amorino (c.1435-40). Complete with “winged sandals”, “tiny tail” and “odd leggings that leave his genitals exposed”, this “pint-sized hedonist” is an intoxicatingly odd creation.

Donatello, it is rightly stressed, was preternaturally gifted at manipulating materials: originally trained as a goldsmith, he was as adept at metalwork as he was fashioning images from terracotta or “hard, crystalline marble”. Frequently, the results are alchemical. His reliefs, often just a few millimetres deep, conjure “an astonishing sense of spatial recession”.

“There’s a limit, however, to the number of seraphic Virgins and Child you can take,” said Mark Hudson in The Independent. After a while, the show’s masterpieces begin to “blur into one”. Moreover, there are confusing ambiguities of attribution: I lost count of the number of works described as “possibly by Donatello”.

Nevertheless, many exhibits are powerful enough to stop you in your tracks: a “blackened bronze” of the crucifixion from Padua is an “essay in ravaged muscularity”; the so-called Madonna of the Apple endows the “sprawling, sulky” infant Christ with “almost casual, everyday realism”. Donatello himself remains elusive throughout. Yet the works assembled here are remarkable enough to make this “an essential exhibition”.

V&A, London SW7. Until 11 June