Notes from The Oxford Companion to Art, ed. H. Osborne (Oxford: OUP, 1970), s.v. ‘Donatello, Donato di Niccolo’
–1386-1466
–’Italian sculptor who is sometimes considered the most original and comprehensive genius of that remarkable group of sculptors, architects, and painters who created a veritable artistic revolution in Florence during the first quarter of the 15th c.’
–Vasari claimed that Donatello ‘had equalled the sculptors of antiquity’
–’His revolutionary conception of sculpture is exemplified in the great series of standing figures in niches which he made for Or San Michele and Florence Cathedral’; the series included the St. George (1425-20) now in the Bargello
–’The most specifically classical of Donatello’s works, for example the bronze David, which is now in the Bargello but stood originally in the court of the Medici Palace, belong to the decade following a visit to Rome in 1430-2′
–in Padua from 1443-53, where ‘he began to react against classical principles’, excepting the Gattamelata (cf. the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius)
–from St. George and the Dragon (1415-20) onward, ‘Donatello’s reliefs were always the most advanced of their time, not perhaps in technical virtuosity but in dramatic effect and spatial complexity’; the St. George is the first surviving example of Brunelleschi’s perspective system in practice
–’exploitation of the expressive possibilities of distortion for dramatic emphasis’ can be seen in the full-length statues of St. John the Baptist, Judith and Holofernes, and St. Mary Magdalene
–’Donatello was the most influential individual artist of the 15th c.’
