Module 3 Donatello Brunelleschi

Hi and welcome to your video lecture today for Module 3 where we will be discussing Donatello and Brunelleschi, two very important Florentine artists from the 15th century. Donatello is primarily known for his works in sculpture and Brunelleschi is primarily known for his works in architecture, although we'll see with Brunelleschi he does a number, he does works in a number of other media as well. Some of the key points that we'll be focusing on today include This was especially a Florentine ideal where artists would be pitted against one another, where their works would be displayed next to each other or they would have to actually compete to win a commission and you can see that it really makes an impact on stylistic developments in this time period. We also see with these two artists a more direct connection to antiquity. We'll be talking a bit about the trip to Rome that Donatello and Brunelleschi take and what impact that has on their production and finally in very close proximity to that direct connection to antiquity we see an even greater sense of classicism in both architecture and sculpture than what we have seen before, even more so than Masaccio, even far beyond what Giotto and Cimabue are doing. We see classical antiquity as a major source for the works of Donatello and Brunelleschi. So here I'm showing you an overhead shot of the Duomo complex, the cathedral complex, of Florence. It's this massive building that dominates its neighborhood and still comes to dominate most of the city. So what we're seeing is the Duomo itself over on the right side with a very high, very famous dome. Right next to the facade of that you see the Campanile, the bell tower that's actually designed by Giotto and then finally the small octagonal building that is directly across from the facade is the Baptistry, often referred to as San Giovanni as Vasari calls it, for example, because it's dedicated to Saint John the Baptist who is actually the patron saint of Florence. And I'll talk in a minute about just how important this Baptistry is to Florentine identity. So I mentioned already this aspect of competition and this is something that we see very prevalent in Florence. It's this republican ideal that the best artist should have to prove himself. And competition became a standard for the Renaissance. It created rivalries between artists and established an environment where these artists had to prove themselves worthy in order to be successful. As artists rise in prominence, the less competition they have to submit to. So it's something they have to do early on in their career and even later they might have to compete in order to win a commission, but almost certainly they would win the commission on their own because of their reputation. So here I'm showing you a more detailed view of the Baptistry. This is a photograph taken from the company lay right next to the Duomo. The Baptistry, as I said, is a very important building for Florentine identity. So it's the place where every single Florentine citizen is baptized very shortly after their birth. It was actually thought to be an ancient temple dedicated to Mars. Now we know that that almost certainly isn't true today, but in the Renaissance they dated this back to antiquity. The decoration of the exterior that you see is largely from the 12th and 13th century. And it really comes to define the way that the exteriors of sacred buildings in Florence are decorated. So this is the standard type with patterning colored marble cladding the entire exterior of the building. The first works I want to talk about today are related to the Baptistry. So again, this is a very important building thought to be antique, dedicated to the patron saint of the city. Well, in the Renaissance, we see the commissioning for a couple of new sets of the doors for the Baptistry. So the building itself was completed, but they wanted to embellish the exterior and add new doors to it. One of the things about Florence that I haven't mentioned yet, it is a republic, but its government is also very heavily influenced by the guilds and the overall guild system. So these are the professional organizations. People are grouped together by their profession and each of the major guilds have oversight of particular civic buildings. And at the Baptistry, we see the Arte del Calimala, the wool weavers guild in charge of the works related to the Baptistry. So guilds had control over major civic centers and thus they also had an impact on government. They were able to help regulate commerce and government. And Florence is very much a city of mercantile values. Here I'm showing you Andrea Pisano's earlier set of doors for the Baptistry here of this date to 1330 to 1336. They originally faced the facade of the Duomo, but now they've been moved to the south side of the structure. These were executed in this very typical international Gothic style. In a quatrefoil, you see the four lobed shape that each of these relief sculptures are in. And it's decorated with scenes from the life of John the Baptist. Well, the Arte del Calimala decided to hold a competition for a new set of doors. They required all the artists who wanted to submit a panel to do so in this quatrefoil shape. And each one had to present the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Here I'm showing you the only two of these competition panels that survived. And these are completed by Filippo Brunelleschi, which you're seeing on the left side and on the right by Lorenzo Ghiberti. Now Ghiberti, we're going to talk about kind of tangentially today. He's a very popular sculptor of the early 15th century and has a very successful career. But he's not quite as influential as Donatello or Brunelleschi, but his name will come up over and over again. And you already saw it in your readings in relationship to Brunelleschi today. So the sources vary about what exactly happened during this competition, depending on whose side the author is on. With Ghiberti on the right side, we see a much more traditional representation, more in the style referred to as the International Gothic. This is a style that is associated with the courts of Europe, and it's characterized by some very stylized drapery. So if we're looking at the figure standing here around the mule, you see his clothing falling in these very nice folds, very rhythmic in his nice patterns. You also see it in the figure of Abraham in his drapery here. So just to give you a little bit of background on the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham was a childless man for many, many, many, many, many years. And finally, God comes to him, tells him he's going to have a son, and he and his wife rejoice. So after Isaac is born, God decides to test his fate and says, you must climb this mountain with your son Isaac and sacrifice him to me. So Abraham, ever faithful, does so. And what we're seeing in both of these panels is the moment when Abraham is about to plunge the knife into his son's throat. And just at that moment, God sends an angel in, and the angel indicates that, no, in fact, take this ram who was caught in the bushes, and that can be your sacrifice. So with Ghiberti's design, you see these different elements of the scene set off to either side. You've got the attendants with the mule down here, whereas Abraham and Isaac are set off to the right, with the angel zooming in and the ram seated on top of this rock up above. You see, Isaac is this rather classicizing nude figure. It's still a little bit stylized. It's done a little fancifully, but it is rather naturalistic. By contrast, you see with Brunelleschi's, a much more dynamic rendering of the subject. So you have his also split into two levels, but here it's a vertical split. So you have the minor characters, the attendant down here at the bottom, whereas the central scene, the central action, Abraham and Isaac is happening right in the center at the top. Here you have a much more dynamic angel zooming in and actually grabbing the arm of Abraham, presenting him from killing his son, and the ram also has a bit more prominence of a position here. In many ways, Brunelleschi's can be seen as rather avant-garde in this period, especially in terms of its composition, because this classicizing style was less familiar to the Florentines. They were much more closely associated with international Gothic style. Ghiberti's panel is actually composed of fewer bronze pieces. So Brunelleschi's was cast and then all of these different pieces were assembled into the quatrefoil design, whereas Ghiberti's was only a couple of pieces. That meant that it would be cheaper to make, and it was also more lightweight, and it also meant that it was more durable. It was less likely that a piece of it would fall off. In his autobiography, Ghiberti coins unanimous and undisputed victory. He wrote, "...universally the glory was conceded to me without a single exception. To all it seemed that I had surpassed all others of that time by the consternation of a tribunal of learned men." By contrast, Brunelleschi's biographer says it was a tie, and that the Calimala Guild asked them, in fact, to work together. Brunelleschi did not get along with Ghiberti, and so instead forfeited that role and went to Rome with Donatello to study sculpture and architecture. So now I wanted to show you in detail the panel of Brunelleschi, and I wanted to point out an even more classicizing detail, something that even though the figure of Isaac isn't necessarily this perfect classicizing nude, we know that Brunelleschi is looking at antique sculpture and incorporating that into his work. So if you look at the figure seated at the lower left here, this attendant with the mule down at the bottom, he's got his foot in his lap and turned up so he can pull a thorn out, which is an exact type of sculpture that has been found in numerous copies from ancient Rome. This is referred to as the spinario, the thorn puller. So he's looking to the classical past and citing that very specifically to incorporate into his work. In the end, as I've indicated, Ghiberti won the commission. It elevated his reputation significantly, and he became the most preeminent sculptor in the city. So both Ghiberti and Brunelleschi were trained as goldsmiths, and eventually they turned to sculpture and actually architecture as well. So the first set of doors that Ghiberti executes are done in this quatrefoil design, and he does scenes from the life of Christ by contrast to Andrea Pisano's earlier scenes from the life of John the Baptist. Eventually Ghiberti is also commissioned to make another set of doors, which you can actually see right here in this image of the baptistry. These aren't done in the quatrefoil design, they're actually done in perspectival relief sculpture in a much more classicizing sense. So we see Ghiberti eventually turning away from the international gothic style using Brunelleschi's developments in perspective and this classicizing sculpture, and these now are referred to as the gates of paradise because it said that Michelangelo stood before them and said these must be what the gates of paradise look like. These are actually reproductions that stand here today. If you want to see the originals, you have to go to the museum of the Duomo, and it's definitely worth a visit there as well. So to continue with talking about works executed for the Duomo, the cathedral, and its adjacent structures, I want to look now at a work by Donatello. So Donatello and Brunelleschi are pretty much contemporaries. We know they're friends, as you can tell from Vasari's biographies of them both. They're both talked about pretty extensively. One of the things that's going on at the Duomo, at just about the same time as the competition being held for the baptistry doors, is that they're commissioning decorative sculpture for the exterior of the building. So they're commissioning figures of apostles and prophets, both to decorate the Campanile, but also to put up on the buttresses of the cathedral. So a work like this Saint John by Donatello would have been intended to be very, very high up above the viewer. Several figures were created by Donatello, and also one of his students named Nanni di Banco, who Vasari mentions as well. And I'm not going to show you any of Nanni di Banco's work. They're quite similar to Donatello's, although not quite as refined. These commissions, though, did bring Donatello and Nanni di Banco to prominence in the city, and subsequently both of them got quite a few public sculptural commissions. What I'm showing you here, the Saint John, is actually one of a series of seated evangelist figures. Now the evangelists are the four gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And this was intended for a niche on the facade of the cathedral. As I already mentioned, it was intended to be seen from below, which indicates, which is something that both sculptors factor into their overall design. And hopefully, just by looking at this, you can see a few things that might indicate that this frontal view isn't quite right. Donatello significantly elongated the torso of the Saint John. And if you look at his hands, they are just massive. They're huge, huge, huge. So if you were to see this from below, the proportions wouldn't seem quite as strange. You would understand an emphasis on his hands, which makes sense for an evangelist. So you're going to see that book in his hand. You're going to understand him as a writer, but also a significant emphasis on his head as, I don't know if a scholar is exactly the right word, but as a significant thinker of the early Christian period. Now here is an example by Donatello that is not quite as classicizing as some of his later works. This is a bit more done in the vein of the international Gothic style. We see an elegance in the drapery, and we get a little bit of a sense of the body underneath the clothing. If you look at his chest, you see how his cloak pulls across his musculature just a little bit. You see the way that it falls in between his knees. But there's a greater emphasis on patterning and a sort of elegant design in the drapery rather than in the body underneath it. You can also see it, I think, the facial hair of these figures sculpted in the international Gothic is one of the best places to see it. You see his beard and these curls that are falling perfectly, turning away from one another a bit more elegantly than a normal beard might be. I now want to talk about this church in the city of Florence. It's a very, very important church called Orsanichele, and this was the guild church in the city. And it's at this church that you can see the greatest amount of competition between the guilds of the city. So each guild was responsible for filling one of the niches that lined the lowest level of this building. Now you can still see these niches today, although each of the sculptures produced in the early 15th century has now been moved to the interior to protect them a bit better. Each guild had a niche, and each was supposed to fill that niche with a sculpture of their patron saints. And this was something that they had decided far in advance of the time period that we're talking about today. But it was right around the 14 teens that they really said that, okay, if you're not going to put a sculpture in it, the city is going to take this over and you're going to lose that. So each guild had this niche right next to their bigger competitors. So they each wanted to have the best statue on display. So the guilds wanted to employ the most prominent sculptors as well as to use the most expensive materials and the largest statues to show their prominence. So you can understand the way they're trying to promote themselves in a couple of different ways by using the sculptors by size and by using a material that showed that you spent the most money on it. So for example, bronze costs a lot more money than wood. Marble is somewhere in between those two. So the first work I'd like to look at that is done for Orsanmichele is Donatello's statue of St. George. So St. George is one of these Eastern saints. He's very commonly shown in the middle of slaying a dragon. And that is one reason that he's shown in armor, because he's one of these military saints. St. George was the patron saint in Florence for the Armorer's Guild, so those who made armor. Originally the statue carried a real sword and wore a real helmet made out of gold. He stands in a very confident pose, looking out and forward as if ready for battle, although he's not given any context because he's just placed in a niche here. It would have been, and this effect would have been enhanced by the actual object that he possessed. Imagine if he saw this golden helmet and a sword, he looked like he was about to charge into battle. Some scholars have tried to explain this sculpture by talking about it as an example of civic humanism. That is, that this sculpture of St. George is specifically responding to contemporary military threats. So even though Florence was fairly stable, they did have a lot of outside threats to their liberties as a republic. Some other art historians refer to it more as in a gothic chivalric tradition, so showing that this is a sort of hero of the Middle Ages. It's interesting that in the sculpture itself he's not shown with his common attribute, the dragon, but instead that's been placed in the relief below. So here I'm showing you the larger niche as a whole. Donatello completes the sculpture within the niche, but also this little relief panel underneath his feet. So here we see St. George's most famous story where he's on horseback in action and he's in the middle of slaying this dragon. So this narrative is very fundamental to understanding who St. George is. It might be difficult to see, but this is done in what's referred to as a schiacciato relief, a sort of squashed relief. It's very low relief meaning that the background has been carved down just a very little bit. This isn't entirely three-dimensional and you see that Donatello has tried to give it a sense of space by barely incising some lines perspectively to give a sense of setting. But it's very active and you see this woman standing here observing it and she's in this perfect classicizing contrapposto pose. Donatello does a number of other sculptures for Orson including the figure of St. Mark and this is where we really see a turn towards classicism. Also in the St. George, but this one really represents it perfectly, I think, much better than his earlier St. John done for Cuomo. The St. Mark is commissioned by the Arte de Minaiuoli, which is the Linen Weavers Guild, as Mark was their patron saint. Here we see a very strong sense of naturalism harkening back to classical ideals in the treatment of the body and especially in the contrapposto pose. Remember that contrapposto is where you have one leg that's doing all the work holding the weight of the body and you have a free leg. This is how people stand and this is a major development of Greek and Roman sculpture where they're trying to show this naturalistic pose and it actually works across the body as well. So directly across from this weighted leg is the arm that's doing some kind of work, so here it's holding a book because again Mark's one of the evangelists, and then that free leg is right across from the free arm so you get this sort of x balance to the sculpture. One of my favorite details of the sculpture though is if you look at that weighted leg really closely and you look at the way the drapery is falling across the body, perhaps more naturalistically than the St. John that was done in a more international gothic style, the folds of the drapery almost look like a classical fluted column. So it's like he's pulling in this architectural element, this very distinctly romanizing architectural feature, and putting it right on display in the middle of Florence. So with Orson Miquele you can see the changing style of art. So Ghiberti does a number of other sculptures for Orson Miquele that I'm not showing you here, but they're done very much in that elegant international gothic style. This would have been directly juxtaposed with Donatello's far more classicizing approach to the human figure. Donatello also pays very careful attention to the action of the drapery with the movement of the body. It informs very much how the clothing falls, so in fact it's like he drapes clothing around the uniform rather than patterning the drapery however he sees fit, how it might look nice. The body really does seem to inform what's happening with the clothing. It's a complete move away from medieval treatment of much sculpture. Now the Linaiole was not as powerful and wealthy a guild as somebody like the Calimala, who represented the wool weavers guild. Their sculpture here was of Saint John the Baptist, completed by Ghiberti, and it's done in bronze. So they are showing their wealth, and by hiring a more famous sculptor, they are also showing their prestige. But the Linaiole are using a lesser material and a less well-known sculptor, even though today Donatello is far more famous. In 1411 that wasn't the case. One of the things that means though is that Donatello actually had more freedom to be innovative than Ghiberti did. If you're working for a more powerful guild, that means they're going to have higher demand, whereas Donatello, working for a lesser guild, could do a bit more with the sculpture without stepping on anybody's toes. I want to show you another kind of sculpture that Donatello completes. What we're looking at here is referred to as a conceria, a singing gallery, and this was made for the interior of the Duomo in Florence in the 1430s. This was one of two singing galleries produced at this time. Here's an image of the second one. This one's by Luca della Robbia, and these were intended to go over doorways in the Duomo so that the choir could come out and stand on these and be in very particular parts of the church itself. Della Robbia was actually hired first. Della Robbia works largely in terracotta and in maiolica, so he's a sculptor of a sort, but typically he doesn't work on quite as large of a scale. What we see in Della Robbia's work is very classicizing relief sculpture and very much imitating Roman sarcophagi. The subject that we see here is an illustration of Psalm 150, and each relief here is depicting a different verse of that psalm. We see classicism in the architectural forms that are used to separate reliefs, so you have these flat fluted pilasters with Corinthian tops, very much Roman in its conception. You also see Roman lettering used to indicate the verses of the psalm and very Roman style of dress. So in these contraria, you would have different groups, typically of boys, who would gather around a single hymn book to sing, and in this, in Della Robbia's relief sculpture, what we probably are seeing is the representation of a confraternity of young boys who sang there. Each figure here is very uniquely depicted, and we can almost think of them as portraits. We see a nice combination of high and low relief, mostly though this is done in quite high relief. By contrast, Donatello's contraria is classicizing in a very different way. His contract stipulated that he followed the multi-panel design of Della Robbia's work. Instead of separate reliefs though, he decided on a continuous frieze almost of dancing putti, and putti is this Italian word that means like little cherub, it could also mean like a little pagan cupid sort of thing, just these sort of little babies that you see in art, and he breaks this relief up by putting these paired columns in the foreground. So in fact, the relief is continuous, but it looks like framed panels in these little colonnades that are used. We see classicizing forms in both the subject with these little dancing putti, but also in the decoration. So for example, on the upper frieze, you have these little bases separated by acanthus leaves, which is exactly the sort of decoration that Donatello would have seen in temple architecture going while he was in Rome. You can even see it in these corbels that are standing here to support it, in the floral garlands that hang down here below, and in the egg and dart molding that runs around the coffers, and all the way underneath the singing platform as a whole. It also, to a certain extent, recalls early Christian art, because if you look behind the putti, you see all these little mosaic pieces, these tesserae, these individual squares of stone or glass that are inlaid here. It's something else that he would have seen in Rome, but also in Florin. The putti are a combination of relief sculpture, and then some of these, the ones that jump out the most into the foreground, are almost completely three-dimensional in form. They're very distinctive and animated figures. So I wanted to show you these because now we see Donatello not just working in freestanding sculpture, we've also seen him working relief, and we also see him doing sculptural works for a more functional purpose, as in this Now I will come back to Donatello, but I wanted to move over to Brunelleschi for just a few minutes to talk about some of his most important civic projects in Florin. As I mentioned, after he gave up the commission to work on the doors for the baptistry, Brunelleschi takes an extended trip to Rome. He stays for quite a long time. He stays for over a decade, even after Donatello goes back. We don't have any really distinctive projects he does while in Rome, but we know he studies the ancient Roman ruins and is very attentive to the classicizing style in Roman architecture. There are a number of new civic projects in the city commissioned by the guilds in addition to The silk manufacturers and the goldsmith guild, the goldsmith's guild was Brunelleschi's own guild, commissioned Brunelleschi for their specific benefits, which was this hospital, the Ospedale degli Innocenti. This is where children could be abandoned and then taken care of. So you can see that in the decoration. Actually, Luca of Della Robbia comes in and does these little myolica reliefs that you see in the spandrels of each archway. There are these swaddled babies. This is a good example of civic responsibility that the guilds took part in. So they're also charitable organizations. Essentially, what Brunelleschi has done, he designs the entire hospital, but we're going to focus on the facade. He designs a loggia, a protected walkway. It was a very common form in Italy and that actually already existed in a couple of places in Rome. There's only a little bit here where he's still directly looking at Roman forms, except in the column capitals. What we have here are these Corinthian column capitals on top of these very slender columns, and each capital supports a springing of this arcade, this series of arches that runs the whole front of the building. And here I'm showing you just a bit more of a detail so you can see the very refined acanthus leaves and these little volutes. Now Brunelleschi would have seen things like this very much so in Rome. It's a very light and airy sort of architecture with very thin architectural members. You do have a very heavy cornice and this entablature that runs all the way across the top. And then it's ended, it's terminated at each end of this arcade by these heavy pilasters that are much, much higher than the columns themselves and support the cornice that is supported in the middle by this arcade. And you have to kind of ignore these end points that have been opened up. These are added later. They're not completely part of Brunelleschi's design. But what he's done here is essentially defined one side of this very large open piazza, and this comes to be a very influential piece of architecture in the city of Florence. Unfortunately, we're not going to get to talk about a lot of that, but we see its direct influence on courtyard design as well as several other buildings. So I wanted to now talk about Brunelleschi's most famous work that he does for the city of Florence. Now this is a nice view over the city of Florence from the area called the Piazzale Michelangelo, so overlooking the city from the other side of the Arno River. And you can see that how much, even today, the Duomo dominates the entire cityscape. Over here towards the left, this high tower is part of the city hall, which is referred to as the Palazzo della Signoria or the Palazzo Vecchio. And we'll talk about that a little bit more in a few minutes. So the Duomo in Florence was begun in 1296. It's quite a different basilica form than other more traditional ones that you see in Rome, for example. It does have that Latin cross plan, but it's got interesting shaped transepts and apses. Instead of perfect semicircles, you see these partial octagonal shapes. Now this plan is showing you a couple of different stages of this. So for example, this much smaller church was the original one on the site before Arnolfo di Cambio comes in and builds on this scale that you're seeing in this sort of dotted area. And then finally, the revised plan of Francesco Talenti begun in 1355 was built on quite a bit of a larger scale, although he adapts Arnolfo di Cambio's project pretty considerably. So this church had been built prior to the lifetime of Brunelleschi, but it had never been topped by a dome. This was a serious architectural problem and they just really weren't sure how to do it. Now remember I told you that Brunelleschi goes to Rome for the first time in 1402. And while he was there, he studied Roman ruins, but also a number of standing Roman buildings, including the Pantheon, which I'm showing you here. Now the Pantheon has one of the most glorious domes that has ever been built. It's massive, it's made of cold concrete, and it just, it seems like it floats there miraculously. So we know that Brunelleschi looked very closely at the Pantheon trying to understand how the ancient Romans had engineered such a dome. They actually could not build domes to cover this much space for a very long time, not until Brunelleschi figured out how to do it. Here's a painted view of the interior of the Pantheon. It's almost impossible to get a photograph getting the entirety of the building, so a painting usually conveys it just a little bit better. In this painting though, it looks a little oblong or like it's a very strange shape, but in fact the shape of the Pantheon is such that you could fit a perfect sphere in it. So this painting has been skewed just a little bit in order for us to understand the space a little bit better. After Brunelleschi comes back from Rome, there's talk about trying to figure out how to finish the dome of the Florence Cathedral. And so here I'm looking, I'm showing you an architectural study of the church done by Brunelleschi, where he's trying to understand how to make this dome work. One of the problems at the Florence Cathedral was that even the drum of the dome had already been built. That is this lower section that includes these round windows, and it couldn't really be modified. Domes carry an enormous amount of thrust that has to be carried down to the ground, and often they require significant buttressing, and that was not an option in the Florence Cathedral. Here we see it as built, so you can see that drum again here that Brunelleschi had to build on top of. He had to develop an entirely new sort of design in order to complete this task. The dome became Brunelleschi's chance to usurp Liberty's newfound prominence after his success at the baptistry. Again, there was a competition for the dome, but no one was sure how to cover this massive span at the crossing of the transept and the maze. Brunelleschi's model won the competition, but the guild insisted that Ghiberti was to assist him. At some point along the way, and as Vasari recounts, Brunelleschi decided to play sick, so that Ghiberti's incompetence at architecture and engineering would be evident, and eventually Ghiberti was dismissed from the project, and now very rarely is his name associated with the dome. So Brunelleschi had to work in this octagonal shape, and the fact that the dome is octagonal means it's actually far less classicizing than a hemispherical dome, but again it was this architectural marvel of the day. What he ended up doing is making this octagonal double shell design, and it worked in such a way so that as more weight was added, the stronger the dome became. It's characterized by these enormous ribs jutting up from the drum of the dome all the way up to the lantern, which is also designed by Brunelleschi, but completed after his death. These act almost like these hidden flying buttresses. In this axiometric projection, you can see almost how the ribs act almost as flying buttresses, really supporting the dome from the drum all the way up to the lantern. It's this large system of pointed arches, which are actually much more stable than rounded arches, and they're held together by these enormous sandstone rings. Here I'm showing you an interior view between the two shells of the dome, giving you a sense of the brickwork that Brunelleschi developed. So it's laid in this sort of herringbone pattern, so that the more that was added, the stronger it became. It became the largest dome built since the Pantheon in Rome. He maybe would have wanted a typical hemispherical dome like the Pantheon, but he had to turn to the Gothic techniques, especially the pointed arch. The shell of the dome is very thin, and the ribs are massive, especially the eight that you can see on the exterior. Now one of the major issues with building a dome is you have to develop some kind of centering, that is some kind of scaffolding that can support the construction project as it goes from bottom to top. Well the Florentine Cathedral was so big, there were no trees big enough to create the appropriate centering. So eventually Brunelleschi designed his own machines to hoist things up, and as I've said a couple of times, he developed this self-buttressing design. It was a triumph of architecture, and it made Brunelleschi famous and sought after by patrons. One of his projects that he began after work started at the Duomo was this small freestanding chapel in the cloister of the church of Santa Croce called the Pazzi Chapel, named for its patrons. So Santa Croce is the Franciscan church in the city, there's lots and lots of family chapels here. This one is also the chapter house for the monks who lived there, so it's a very functional chapel. The Pazzi are a Florentine noble family, and this is commissioned by the patriarch Andrea Pazzi, and in many ways it's an emulation of other Medici commissions across town, which unfortunately I don't have time to show you. It's their funerary chapel, but as I said, it's also the chapter house for the monks who lived here. On the exterior, what we're seeing here is very classicizing forms of architecture. So we have this porch supported by six Corinthian capitals, above which runs a continuous frieze, and then this central feature with the arch and these traviations over the columns is referred to as a serliana, this motif, and it's a very, very classicizing motif that lots of Renaissance architects use. One of the defining features of this is on columns, which we see here, which we saw also in the Ospedale dell'Unicenti and in other projects I won't show you today. And then in this attic story that we see here, you've got small pilasters that are continuing the vertical elements of the columns below. It's very difficult to see in this image, but there's actually two domes present. So you have the one that's very visible here, and then you have another more shallow dome over the central space of this porch. Here I'm showing this to you in ground plan at the bottom and then in a cutaway view of the interior. So you can see the proportional systems being utilized. And here you can also see the smaller dome that covers that central area of the porch. Brunelleschi is very adherent to the tenants of Vitruvius. Now Vitruvius was the writer of the only surviving architectural treatise from antiquity. So this was a way for Renaissance architects to understand the building process and to understand the thinking and proportions that the Romans were interested in. When Brunelleschi was in Rome, he came to realize that Vitruvius' writings didn't actually follow what the buildings acted in as evidence. Instead, there's a separation in theory with Vitruvius than in actual practice. So in the Pazzi Chapel, we see Brunelleschi following Vitruvius' suggestions very carefully for a proportional system. So in the ground plan, you can see that it's a rectangular chapel. Here's the entranceway looking towards the high altar right here. He added these little extra arms here instead of making it a perfectly square building, which would have been much more harmonious because of its function as a chapter house. It needed to be a bit bigger than what a cube on the site would have allowed. It is rather constricted by the space that it occupies in the cloister because it stands between the dormitory where the monks lived and the chapels of the large church. Now I wanted to remind you again that Brunelleschi is the one who we know rediscovers one point perspective. But here's that diagram again of how he developed this system of understanding the relationship between a reflected image and how that could be translated onto a two-dimensional panel. You may remember from last lecture that I mentioned that he did this utilizing the baptistry. He stood in the doorway at the Duomo, stood with his back to the baptistry, and looked through these panels to understand how it might be translated geometrically into a two-dimensional form. So here's another artist's rendering of how that would have worked. So we see him holding up this mirror with his back to the baptistry and he sees the baptistry reflected in the mirror and cast onto this polished painted surface. So it's a rather complex system. It determined how artists could utilize linear perspective in the rendering of architecture and in creating three-dimensional space. So one of Brunelleschi's major contributions is this rediscovery and, as we know, he told Masaccio, among other people, about how to do this. For the last few images, I'd like to return to the work of Donatello. This is maybe Donatello's most famous work. We have here a statue of David and this is not his first time sculpting this subject. In fact, about 30 years before, Donatello had been commissioned to create another sculpture of David. Here I'm showing you that work, which is executed in marble. We see a rather triumphant David who has recently slain Goliath, whose head we see lying at his feet. This was done for the city and was done for one of the Duomo projects specifically. So this was a subject he was quite familiar with. In this case, though, instead of being a more public commission done for one of the major civic buildings, this was a private commission by the Medici family. Now the interesting thing about the figure of David is he's one of the major symbols of the city of Florence. David is seen as this underdog, this young boy who's able to triumph over evil. Remember that David was the shepherd boy who eventually was the only one willing to go into hand-to-hand combat with the giant Goliath. And he takes his slingshot and he hits Goliath right in the head and he knocks him down and then takes his own sword and cuts off Goliath's head. So this was seen as, to Florence, this was a very powerful symbol to show themselves as this underdog who would be triumphant. If the Medici adopt this for this sculpture, we see an appropriation of civic imagery for a private citizen. So the Medici, even though they're considered and were a very famous and powerful family, they did not have actual power over Florence until well into the 16th century. They were more the de facto rulers. They made sure they were friends with the right people, they had friends in high places, and they have a really rocky relationship actually with the city. For a while they're expelled and then they're allowed to come back and then they're expelled again. So it's interesting to see the Medici borrowing this type of David for their own palace. Following the 1495 expulsion of the Medici from the city, the civic government took this statue of David to the Palazzo della Signoria, that city hall I mentioned, put it in the courtyard, and added a new inscription to it, making it the city's, calling it an exemplum of public well-being. This is a very interesting sculpture for lots of reasons. It's very classicizing. We see Donatello again adopting the contrapposto position. But one of its hallmarks is that it is the first life-size bronze nude created since antiquity. So this is a really good example of how Donatello is trying to compete with the ancients. So David here is shown as, I don't know, about 13 years old, so a young boy appropriate to the biblical story. There's no way he could have beat this giant without the help of God. And we see him sort of toying with the head of Goliath that lies down here at the bottom. Here I'm showing it to you from the rear side so you can get a better sense of the relationship of the helmeted head of Goliath and David. Here you can also see the stone in David's hand, which he had used to take Goliath down. There's been some attempts by art historians to talk about this as a homoerotic sculpture. And one way that's seen is, well, first in the nudity of the figure, but also notice this wing of the helmet is reaching up his legs. So there's some ambiguities here about exactly what's going on. David stands on top of this laurel wreath. The head rests also on the laurel wreath because that was a common symbol of victory. But there's also some pagan associations with this work of art. Now this would have stood in the courtyard of the Medici Palace and would have actually been visible from the street. So here I'm showing you the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici looking in from the major entrance and it would have stood about where this sculpture is here today. But remember, as I said, it was taken by the city and now it's in a museum in Florence. Because of his hat and because there's really not a lot of religious symbols being incorporated here, it does seem that this might be an interpretation of David also as the god Mercury. So Mercury was the messenger god and his attributes include a hat very similar to the one that David is wearing here, but also he commonly wore winged sandals because he's able to fly from place to place. In some of his stories, he is carrying a decapitated head and the imagery shown on the helmet of Goliath is also considered pagan triumph. You see all these little putti figures here. You see the sandals that he's wearing and now the wings aren't exactly attached to that, but still it could be interpreted also as Mercury. Oh, I forgot to mention this detail as well, but often cited as part of the homoerotic intentions. You see David playing in Goliath's beard with his toes. So there's some ambiguities as I've said. So if this sculpture could be interpreted as Mercury, that does avoid some of the problems of the Medici appropriating public images. Mercury was also the patron god of merchants and the arts, so that would be a very appropriate symbol for the Medici family. It could be read as both, and there's nothing wrong with reading it in both ways. So here I wanted to just compare briefly the two different versions of David that Donatello executed. You can see some similarities, but I imagine the differences jump out to you even more dramatically because earlier David is not exactly in a contrapposto stance. It feels a little stiffer, a little more formal. You don't have the same sort of emotional impact with the portrait with the face being shown here. We definitely have the Goliath head in both cases, but it's much less ambiguous in terms of what the subject is with the marble work of art, especially because this would have been for the Duomo. With the David done for the Medici with emphasis on the nudity and a much more classicizing contrapposto pose. I also wanted to show you here on the left side, this figure that was in the Palazzo della Signoria, the city hall, also called the Palazzo Vecchio, of the god Hermes. Now Hermes is the Greek name for Mercury, and I think you can see the similarities in pose, but also in the hat that he's wearing, so it supports that notion that this could be read in a couple of different ways. Finally, I wanted to show you one more sculpture by Donatello, and this is his work depicting Judith and Holofernes, dating a bit later from 1456 to 1457. One of the other major symbols of Florence was the story of Judith, and that's why we're seeing that here. Judith is often considered to be the female counterpart to David, and this work was also commissioned by the Medici and placed in the Medici Palace, although it was actually inside the garden in the courtyard. So if we're looking here, back behind this sculpture, you can see their small private garden, and the Judith would have stood there, acting as a very nice counterpart to the David that stood in the courtyard itself. Now the story of Judith is that she was this, this is a story from the Apocrypha, and she was this beautiful widow who lived in the city of Bethulia. Her city was being besieged by the Assyrian army, which was led by the general named Holofernes. The story goes that she is the one who saved her city by going and meeting with Holofernes. She gets him drunk, and eventually he passes out when they're all alone, and then she decapitates him. She and her maidservant are able to sneak out of his tent. They place his head on the city walls, and the Assyrian army goes running off terrified. So we're seeing the most dramatic moment here, where Judith is standing over Holofernes. She has the sword raised. She's holding him by the hair, and she's about to decapitate him. It's an interesting composition. It's a subject that works a little bit better in painting, but here Donatello has worked it out quite nicely. Holofernes is seated on this pillow, which actually is standing on this triangular base, with classicizing relief sculpture running around the edges of it. Judith is shown very heavily clothed, showing her as this virtuous woman, whereas Holofernes is practically nude. It's a very gruesome image, and one of the things you can't quite see is that Judith's other foot is stepping on Holofernes' groin. And actually, I misspoke before, this is not the first time she struck him. This will actually be the second blow to fully take off his head. And it also is given an inscription in the Medici household. It's an inscription of a very political nature for a private setting. It said, Piero, son of Cosimo, has dedicated the statue of this woman to that liberty and fortitude bestowed on the Republic by the invincible and constant spirit of the citizen. It's a very interesting inscription to place there for private patrons who really did, in fact, have de facto rule of Florence. Just like with the David, it is eventually taken to the Palazzo della Signoria. For many years, it's displayed outside of the palace, but today it's inside the Palazzo, which is now a museum, and you can see it there. So that will conclude my lecture for Module 3 on Donatello and Brunelleschi. Hopefully, you can see the significant influence of antiquity on the works of these two artists in both sculpture and in architecture. And also, we talked pretty considerably about the idea of Florentine competition, especially in the commissions for the baptistry and for Orsani Caeli. So thank you for listening, and I will see you for Module 4.