Early Renaissance sculpture

In our whirlwind tour of the early Renaissance, we're moving on to sculpture and back to the famous competition panels for the Florence Cathedral's baptistry doors. Our historians often cite the 1401 contest as the opening event of the Renaissance, and these competing relief sculptures also serve as a good introduction to the works we'll be looking at today. Anyway, that's my story about why I'm going to talk about a non-required work, and I'm sticking to it. You've already learned that Ghiberti beat out Brunelleschi. Now that you know more about Renaissance aesthetics, I want you to think about what might have made the judges choose Ghiberti's interpretation of the Bible story. Remember, Ghiberti was very young. He was just 23. The city fathers and church leaders of Florence who were making this decision were taking a big chance with a project that ultimately cost as much as the city's annual defense budget. Actually, it took the judges two years to make up their minds, and historians still debate about why Ghiberti beat out Brunelleschi. One persuasive argument is that Ghiberti's design, because it used less bronze, would cost the city fathers fewer Florence. A more generous interpretation would be that Ghiberti's ability to cast his bronze in just two pieces while producing more detail showed that he had a greater mastery of the craft elements of production. Remember, artists were still viewed at least as much, if not more, as craftsmen than as innovative creators, although that's changing. Ghiberti was a goldsmith by training, and clearly he knew his way around metals. Note, too, that both works are highly expressive and filled with movement, and the figures in both works stand realistically with contrapposto, so they both contain important Renaissance elements. But it seems pretty clear that while Brunelleschi's work is arguably the emotionally powerful, Ghiberti's shows a greater grasp of spatial techniques that had largely disappeared with the fall of Rome. One of these techniques is illustrated here. For shortening, note how Ghiberti's angel captures the distortion that is seen by the eye when an object or figure is viewed at a distance or at an unusual angle as coming out toward us. This is rather a busy slide, but I think it gives a helpful summary and I think the illustrations are fun. Another clue seems to lie in the way the artist chose to depict Isaac. So what do you see? Ghiberti's Isaac is actually less emotional, perhaps because he's caught sight of the angel, perhaps because he represents a classical heroic ideal, stoic in the face of But note his gorgeous nude body with its highly defined musculature. This guy is buff. Ghiberti had studied statues in Rome. Brunelleschi's journeys to Rome would come later, and Ghiberti is consciously modeling Isaac on the Greco-Roman ideal. Polykleitos, I think, would have been pleased. So finally, what difference do you notice in the depiction of physical space? Not only the foreshortened angle, but the receding rock create a greater sense of depth and volume in Ghiberti's work. It's a little ironic, since it's Brunelleschi who worked out the mathematics of perspective that would transform Renaissance painting. Okay, now we're moving on to Ghiberti's most famous student, Donatello. This scene, sculpted for the baptismal font of Siena Cathedral, is not a required work, but it does demonstrate another hugely important development. What am I thinking of? Well, actually, there are a lot of Renaissance elements in this work, and elements that came to be associated with Donatello. Like the paintings of Giotto, this work captures a very human narrative. We see the horror on the faces of the banqueters when they are suddenly confronted with John the Baptist's head. We see children cowering in the corner. And as our eye moves back into the composition, notice how the figures become calmer and more detached. They are not yet witnessing this scene. The figures have real bodies under their clothes, with muscles, flesh, and bone. And note how all of the figures, even the children, twist around the head of John the Baptist. The tension radiates up and right from that off-center focal point, creating a sense of dynamism. But what really makes this work masterful and important to art historians is how it creates an illusion of depth. The foreground is sculpted in high relief, which becomes shallower as the scene moves up and back. The architectural features, including the floor tile, help draw the eye back into the space, as does the open center, the rectangular table, and the pattern in the floor. Already, this work shows a greater mastery of the one-point perspective that Filippo Brunelleschi has just discovered and systematized. Which brings us to one of the most important technical aspects of the course, the development of a mathematically based optical technique of perspective. The Greeks understood an employed perspective, and Pythagoras worked out much of the math, but it was Filippo Brunelleschi and his Italian Renaissance successors who would rediscover and then build on these insights. I chose this photo because it demonstrates the simplest optical perception of depth. As we look down the road into the distance, the space narrows. Eventually, at the horizon line, it disappears. That's the vanishing point. The white lines on the road edge make convenient orthogonals, and I've tried to draw in the horizon line. I do not think Brunelleschi would hire me on as an assistant, even with a computer to help. This diagram makes the same point schematically. The horizon line lies on a line with the vanishing point. The ground line represents the place where we stand. Actually, one of the interesting things you should ask about works of art is, where are we supposed to be, and how is the painting designed to draw us into the action of the painting or the sculpture? Those diagonals, known as orthogonals, provide a mathematical means of drawing to optical or perspective scale. I'm not going to ask Ms. Jacobs to show the Khan Academy introduction to linear perspective in class. It's longer and more detailed than we have time for, and I think your textbook explained this quite well. I've put it up on Moodle, though, if you'd like to know more or would like to see it with good, interesting computer-generated graphics. But I would like you to spend just a moment playing around with the Interactive, which is also up on Moodle. We're not going to worry as much about two- and three-point perspective. I thought it was well explained in your textbook, but these drawings should give you an idea of how the same mathematical ideas can be applied to two or even three vanishing points. We're going to come back to linear perspective when we look at painting, and especially The Last Supper and The School of Athens, but for now, let's continue on with Donatello. The good news is I don't think the College Board is likely to ask you to attribute a work you haven't studied to Donatello, and my reasoning is that his work is too extraordinarily varied to pin down with simple comparisons or attributions. So here are three of his many famous works. You see the classical influence in the Statue of St. Mark. This is an early work. You see contrapposto and naturally flowing draperies. Judith adds the political message to the biblical narrative that we've also seen in David, although I think this one is more straightforwardly true to the Florentine interpretation of the story. The Mary Magdalene, which is my personal favorite, is extraordinarily expressive, a little reminiscent of Hellenistic sculpture. Think of the old market woman. Donatello, by the way, began his career as a woodcarver. So I'm going to quote again from Paul Johnson's History of Art. Donatello was a risk taker. He was always doing things which had not been done before. He completed the revolution which began in the 13th century of moving away from the collective presentation of human beings, first by portraying them as individuals in high relief or bronze or stone, then pulling them right out of the background and making them standing statues. Once and for all, Donatello put humans on their own feet as they had stood in ancient times. And now we get to our one required work of early Renaissance sculpture. The immediate context for the work was Florence's defeat of the stronger Duchy of Milan in 1401. Goliath really takes on the role of the Duke of Milan in this sculpture. Of course, you could argue that the rather dictatorial Medici were themselves usurping that symbolism. And that's what the people of Florence seemed to think when, after the Medici fell from favor, they moved the statue out of the Medici Palace courtyard and into the Piazza della Signoria or the town hall outside, the plaza outside the town hall. But what do you think of the statue itself? What's your honest reaction? Well, before I give you mine, let's return to the story of Cosimo de' Medici. By the way, you're going to hear stories of two artists, not only Donatello, but also Fra Filippo Lippi. That's okay. He's coming up later today. I think this video presents a very interesting and plausible thesis about not only the role of patrons, but about how Cosimo de' Medici's tolerance and indeed encouragement of individual creative vision helped produce what we call the Italian Renaissance. Okay, the video captures what struck me right between the eyes when I first saw this statue in the flesh, so to speak. It is deeply, almost creepily sensual. And I say creepily because to me it has at least some overtones of pedophilia. And because the figure's nudity is accentuated and made more provocative by the fact that he's still wearing boots and a hat. The feather from Goliath's hat that sneaks up David's thigh, unrealistically high up David's thigh, and the almost sleepy expression add to the sensuality of the sculpture, which seems to me to be a little at odds with the militaristic moment and with the political significance of David to the Florentines. Donatello's David is not only the first freestanding nude in a thousand years, it also represents the rebirth of cast bronze sculpture using the lost wax method. This is a hollow statue. Bronze had been used for sculpted doors as we saw, but not for sculptures on this scale. This is quite a large work. The statue contains many other important classical elements. So we see the off-kilter symmetria, reminiscent of classical Greek and even more of Hellenistic Greek sculpture. And like statues such as the Lacoan, Donatello sets up this dynamic contrast between bent and straight, between relaxed and tense. Yet for all the triumph implied in Goliath's severed head at David's feet, you could argue that the statue really sends a message of peace more than it sends a message of war. There's been a lot of speculation about the meaning of that soft hat, but clearly it creates an interesting juxtaposition with Goliath's military helmet. The headgear of a peaceful shepherd, perhaps a straw hat to keep out the sun, compared to the armor of war. Note too how the rock in one hand balances Goliath's sword held in another. Maybe this too is a contrast between peaceful mercantile Florence and militaristic Milan. We don't actually know how the people of Florence viewed this statue. Some art historians think that many of them saw it as a depiction of Mercury rather than David, but they must have admired it to give Donatello's David such a prominent place at the heart of Florentine power. Florentine sculptors actually went on to produce three famous Davids for the city that loved their hero. We'll get to Michelangelo's David in a couple of days. This bronze by Verrocchio was sculpted a few decades after Donatello's. So what difference do you notice? Differences, by the way, that are due more to the artist's different visions than to the slightly later date. Well, this David is an adolescent too, but he is kind of a cocky bad boy. Your textbook suggests that the model might have been one of Verrocchio's streetwise apprentices. And, of course, he keeps his clothes on, which strikes me as a good call when facing off against a giant with a sword. The postures are nevertheless quite similar, with the off-kilter contraposto stance, and, of course, both show a beautiful young male body. So I think this is a particularly intriguing example of how different artistic visions, same art historical periods, same subject in many ways, same context, shape different versions of works on the same theme. I'm going to stop here and move on to early Renaissance painting in my next podcast.