Donatello Pays the Rent: Work Life of a Quattrocento Artist

Florence was well situated at the start of the century to use and spread artistic learning of all kinds from all parts of the world. Now we've already mentioned several times the sculptor Donato di Nicolo di Betto Bardi, who was also called Donatello, 1386 to 1466, one of the most famous sculptors of the renaissance and a native of Florence. He is typical of the new artists in many ways. For one thing, he came from a trader family, not the nobility. His father was a prominent guild member, Guild of Wool Traders Arte della Lana, one of the major guilds responsible for weaving and for importing wool from England. Donatello trained as a goldsmith early in his life, working with soft gold, learning to set precious gems into pieces of jewelry, and developing skill in metalworking were all important steps for an artist who would work mainly in bronze and stone. The goldsmiths also taught apprentices how to draw up designs, plan out an artwork, and take care of materials in a workshop, all skills that any artist could use. In addition, their prestigious guild could introduce a young artist to many wealthy patrons. One of Donatello's early breaks was to get a job from an older designer, Ghiberti, who had won a competition to redesign the doors of a famous church in Florence. Let's take a look. This was the famous baptistery where Dante himself, as well as every other baby born in Florence for centuries, had been baptized. Just around 1400, the Citizens' Council of Florence decided that this baptistery's doors needed redesigning. They wanted the doors to reflect the beauty and sophistication of their city. So a very large design competition was set by the city, with a prize awarded to the best design, juried and funded by the Wool and Cloth Merchants' Guild, the Calimalla, a different wool guild, one of the oldest, richest, and most powerful guilds in Florence. This guild's members were responsible for importing woolen cloth from France and elsewhere, and finishing it in Florence for sale, you know, dyeing and completing the pieces. Each competitor submitted a sample panel in bronze, and by all accounts, including those of his fellow artists, the 29-year-old bronze sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti's 1378-1455 was the best. We actually do have his sample panel, which is pretty impressive. The way a commission worked was similar to today. Ghiberti would be the designer and also chief administrator of the project, and under him, other sculptors had a chance to work. He put Donatello and various other artists in his workshop in charge of a part of the work, and paid them a living wage from the commission money. The project took 25 years to complete, and Ghiberti and his workshop got another commission from the city of Florence after that for the East Doors, the Doors of Paradise. So this was a lifelong commission for Ghiberti. Commissions could be very specific. Often, buildings were designed with particular spaces that would be eventually filled by statues. The Orsanmichele Church, for instance, completed in 1404, had built into its outer facade by the architect who designed it, 14 special niches, also called tabernacles, each designated to be completed by one of the guilds. So it was sort of a tribute to all the guilds. Donatello was hired by several different guilds over a period of six or seven years. For the armorers and sword makers, he did a sculpture of St. George slaying the dragon. St. George was their patron saint. For the guild of butchers, a statue of their patron saint, St. Peter. For the linen guild, their patron saint, St. Mark. Donatello and his artist friends brought to their work a deep appreciation for ancient Greek statues. This is more revolutionary than it sounds. For ages, pagan art, including nude female and male bodies, mythological subjects, even cupids, sphinxes, fauns, and gods and goddesses of ancient Greece, had been looked at with some fear and not much understanding. Florence of this time, like other cities in Italy, was strewn with ancient marble heads, torsos, other body parts from smashed or trashed Greek and Roman marble statues, alleyways and trash-strewn gutters, as well as waste areas around the city. Abandoned mines and grazing fields were littered with these antiquities that had gone unnoticed and untreasured for centuries, just lying there in dirt. But attitudes were changing. Donatello and his artist friends began to scavenge and study these relics, learning proportion of faces and bodies, how to carve realistic hair, how to bring more movement and life into their own sculptures, and even tricks for dealing with perspective. Sometimes they made some money, too, cleaning, repairing, and selling them to humanist art collectors. Donatello made a sideline of restoring ancient statuary for his patron Cosimo de' Medici, in fact. Donatello is famous for a reason. Having learned from his study of Greek and Roman sculptures and the newly rediscovered writings on ancient geometry and philosophy, he became a pioneer in methods of making stone figures look natural to the eye, fluid, not rigid or stiff. The seated Saint John that he did for an outside niche in Florence's namesake church, the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, shows this naturalism. One leg falls slightly outward, relaxed, and the drapery looks real, flowing. The medieval stiffness is almost completely gone. And Donatello didn't just create the figure true to life, either. He took into account how the statue would look from the angle at which it would most commonly be seen. Since Donatello knew that the placement of the statue would be above eye level, he extended the torso and shortened the legs. So, looking at it straight on, it looked out of proportion, like the legs were too short. But looked at from below, it looked perfect and natural. The naturalism was created by an artist's visual trick, one that the Greeks and Romans had known about and used also. This was new, too, after hundreds of years when this kind of naturalism was not prized in art at all. Take a look at Donatello's Saint Mark. Donatello captured in marble a fluid balance. Saint Mark looks like he's really standing with his hip carrying weight, a kind of James Dean cool posture. All his weight is on his right leg and hip, while his left is slightly bent, indicating that it's able to be moved and not really bearing much weight at all. In Italian, contrapposto, opposite position, where the shoulder opposite the leg with the weight moves upwards. The other shoulder, above the tense, straight right leg, moves down a little bit to compensate for the body's weight being shifted right. Donatello used this rediscovered contrapposto pose for another masterpiece of his, commissioned by the Medici for their palace entrance. A statue of the young shepherd David, who, the Bible story goes, faced the giant Philistine Goliath with no armor and using only a slingshot and five smooth stones, succeeded in defeating him and perhaps his sense of humor, or maybe his sense of attraction. At the time, the statue was a bit controversial. Should David, a traditional symbol of the city of Florence, be portrayed as such a beautiful, young, almost flirtatious boy? Donatello, in fact, set a trend with his nude contrapposto David. Years later, Donatello's own former teacher, Vetterocchio, did a very similar bronze statue, removing the fancy hat, straightening him up, lifting his head, and adding fake Arabic writing, pseudo-Arabic, also known as pseudo-Kufic, a frequent feature of Renaissance art during this period. Western Renaissance artists thought of Arabic as an ancient biblical language, but unless they were Spanish, they often didn't know too much actual Arabic, so they used fake Arabic as a decorative motif. Vetterocchio's David seems much less flirty, although he still looks very young. And 60 years later, Michelangelo, the divine, il divino, best sculptor of his age, took up Donatello's contrapposto David challenge as well, enlarging the figure to superhuman size and showing him as he prepares to engage the giant Goliath, looking determined and introverted, less cute than athletic, even heroic, with a muscular build like Hercules. Donatello was relatively openly, for the time, gay, as were quite a few artists, including three out of the four Ninja Turtles of Michelangelo, obviously. Only Raphael seems to have been pretty solidly heterosexual. At this time, sodomy, the legal term for same-sex sexual acts between men, was legally punishable by death in Florence. About 100 years before this, following an Italian inquisition by Pope Gregory IX, homosexual sex had gone from completely legal to incurring the death penalty in most of Europe. In the 1400s, there was clearly a new openness in society regarding gender and sex. A certain rent-like, bohemian, artist's-style atmosphere in the quarter of the city was apparently an open secret in Florence, and perhaps in most of the bigger urban areas. There's no record that Donatello was ever arrested or charged with a crime of sodomy, although there is a record that Leonardo da Vinci was, along with three other men in 1476. All were acquitted. Perhaps the influence of the new education, the reading of the Greek philosopher Plato especially, who's very popular right now, in his dialogues, he often praises same-sex love between men as being particularly virtuous and even particularly masculine. Without the Christian filter of the medieval period, maybe this new education slant can be seen even during Donatello's and da Vinci's time softening and challenging some public ideas about same-sex love between men. It would be another 150 or so years before the art historian Johann Joachim Winkelmann would leave his native Germany and come to Italy to live, finding and writing completely openly about the beauty of same-sex love and homoeroticism in ancient Greek and Roman literature and art. During that later time, in the 18th century, intellectual writers like Goethe, whom we'll read, are finally able to take a less judgmental look at homosexual love, as we'll see. But at this time, perhaps the influence of Plato was already sort of being seen in public opinion about homosexuality. Donatello built up his workshop and career systematically. He took trips beyond Florence, staying for even months and years in Padua and Rome. He and his older friend, the architect and sculptor Filippo Brunelleschi, designer of the Florentine Duomo, dome on top of the city's namesake church that we've seen, Santa Maria del Fiore, may even have visited Rome together to study the ancient buildings and statuary. Donatello traveled for commissions too. He spent a few years in Padua when referred there for a large equestrian, that is a horse rider, commission in honor of the recently deceased condottiero, the mercenary general, Gattamelata. Another watershed moment, since this was the first freestanding public bronze statue of a soldier upon a horse, an equestrian statue that had been commissioned and created since ancient times. Money, food, and lodging were always a bit precarious for artists, so it was important to hustle. And if one didn't live in a decent-sized city such as Florence, commissions could be practically non-existent. This situation led to much maneuvering, and the competition for commissions could be fierce. But solidarity among artists was a code of honor during this time. Artists often taught and defended other artists, despite sometimes bitter competition for commissions. When Ghiberti won the competition for the baptistery doors, the other artists who had applied all approved of him and acknowledged him the legitimate winner. Artists who could afford to be generous work. Even those who were not particularly wealthy made a point of supporting other artists. The Sare says of Donatello that he was a singularly generous person, even careless with money sometimes, definitely not a banker. Donatello was said to have kept a basket of money payments hanging from the ceiling. He would just toss the money in there so that anyone, apprentices, friends, or fellow artists working in collaboration, as was often the case on large projects, could take what they needed at any time without asking him. The economy was in flux during the Quattrocento. Payment for artisans of all kinds was becoming more individualized through the patronage system, which at times challenged the system of commissions through the city and the guilds themselves. The guilds had always set fair prices for commodities like wool, wine, carpentry, or shoes, but the guild system faced challenges when it came to sponsorship of the arts, forcing many artists to fend for themselves. Even Michelangelo, whose family was very wealthy, haggled frequently over price with his clients, including famously Pope Julius II, as well as the 12 other popes for whom he worked over the course of his lifetime. It could be a desperate race for artists trying to make enough to subsist on, despite the abundance of work. Donatello charged enough to make a living, and seems to have been one of the luckier ones who got what he needed. Not surprisingly, Donatello could become impatient with clients who did not value his and his fellow artists' artwork. When a certain Genoese merchant asked Donatello to make a bronze head for him, but then came to pick it up and refused to pay what Donatello was asking for it, Donatello, angry at the disrespect, knocked the bronze head off a second-story wall, and it smashed into pieces when it hit the pavement below. The offered him twice his fee to remake it, but Donatello refused. He commented to the merchant that he must be more used to bargaining over beans than over artwork. This was more than just a joke. Donatello, his artist friends, and the artists who came after him were forging a new identity for artists. These Renaissance artists, relying on patrons like the guilds and the richer families of Florence working in stone, wood, or oil paint, were using new knowledge recaptured from Greek and Roman texts, math, geometry, the science of eyes and vision, and the study of marble statues and actual human bodies to overturn and create new images and to build their own individual reputations.