Sculpture Journal is the foremost scholarly journal devoted to sculpture in all its aspects across the globe. In this blog post, Guest Editors Rachel Boyd and Whitney Kerr-Lewis introduce the newly published and upcoming special issues of the journal, titled Donatello: Innovation and Collaboration and Donatello: Legacy and Inspiration.

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The V&A’s landmark Donatello exhibition brought together 129 objects from collections across the UK, Europe and America. It was also a moment to celebrate the V&A’s own extraordinary holdings of sculptures by Donatello, his contemporaries, and his followers – ranging from fifteenth-century carvings to nineteenth-century plaster casts – and to examine these objects in a new light.

The conference, organized by the exhibition’s curators Peta Motture and Whitney Kerr-Lewis, research assistant Sabrina Villani, and the V&A Research Institute, invited participants to consider a range of topics, including Donatello’s training, his collaborators, and his legacy. These two special issues of Sculpture Journal have given speakers an opportunity to expand upon and develop their conference papers, and to share them with a wider audience, including those who are not Renaissance specialists.

This first issue, 34.1, includes five contributions firmly grounded in Donatello’s work and world. Combining technical analysis with traditional connoisseurship, Alison Luchs and Daphne Barbour provide new insights into the facture and attribution of an early fifteenth-century terracotta sculpture known as the Mellon Madonna. The second essay focuses on two recently conserved sculpture groups – Donatello’s bronze pulpits in the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence, and the font for the baptistery of Siena Cathedral. Conservators Maria Baruffetti, Stefania Agnoletti, Annalena Brini, Alessandro Pacini, Elisa Pucci, and Laura Speranza reflect on some of the most intriguing and surprising findings from their treatments of these monuments. Next, Daniel Zolli moves the geographic focus to Padua, as he explores the nature and the significance of Donatello’s collaborations with multiple other artists and artisans in producing monumental bronzes, including the equestrian statue of Gattamelata. Una D’Elia’s essay analyses other types of collaborations, those between painters and sculptors who both contributed to the making of painted sculptures that were prevalent in fifteenth-century Italy. The final contribution, by Joaneath Spicer, examines Donatello’s adaptations of an ancient Roman small bronze in the collection of Lorenzo Ghiberti.

The second special issue, which is now available online, moves from Donatello’s world to more recent history. Four essays explore different facets of the impact and perception of Donatello and his work in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America. Daniele Rivoletti analyses a seeming paradox in mid-nineteenth century Paris, when early fifteenth-century Italian sculpture gained popularity in private collections, but not in museums, such as the Musée du Louvre, where an interest in promoting historic French sculpture prevailed instead. Jacqueline Musacchio provides insight into American culture around the same time, demonstrating how much the American experience of Donatello was mediated by novels, guidebooks, photographs, and plaster casts – some of which we now know had nothing to do with the actual sculptor Donatello. Martha Dunkelman offers further analysis of the American market for plaster casts of works then attributed – in many cases, we now know, mistakenly – to Donatello. A clear preference emerges for endearing imagery, including depictions of the Virgin and Child. Finally, Geraldine Johnson focuses on the critical role of photography in shaping the nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography of Donatello in Europe and America.

The essays are complemented by two shorter features that emphasize the legacy of Donatello up to the present day. First, we interview Peta Motture and Sam Brown, the lead curator and lead 3D designer of the V&A’s 2023 Donatello exhibition. Motture and Brown reflect on the challenges and achievements of the exhibition’s design, focusing on architecture, lighting, and the inspiration of the urban environment of Florence. The temporary departure of many Renaissance sculptures from the V&A’s permanent galleries was the catalyst for the work of V&A Artist in Residence Rebecca Stevenson, whose term coincided with the Donatello exhibition. ‘In conversation with V&A curator Michaela Zöschg, Stevenson explores the sculptures she created in response to these absences, and which expand on themes central to Renaissance art.

These two special issues reinforce the enduring power of Donatello’s art in his day and in the five and a half centuries since his death, as well as his continuing relevance to living makers and viewers alike.  As V&A curators, we are privileged to look after some of Donatello’s greatest masterpieces, including his low-relief marble Ascension with Christ giving the Keys to St Peter and the remarkable gilt bronze roundel known as the Chellini Madonna, which can be seen on permanent display in our galleries – alongside hundreds of other magnificent Renaissance sculptures – for all to enjoy.

Donatello’s body of work continues to elicit new observations, reactions, and questions to this day. We hope that the contributions collected in these volumes will play a role in expanding and continuing conversations around Donatello well into the future.

Rachel Boyd and Whitney Kerr-Lewis.

Rachel Boyd is Senior Curator of Renaissance Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Whitney Kerr-Lewis is the Curator of Sculpture 1800-now at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Co-Curator of the exhibition Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance.

Browse part one – Donatello: Innovation and Collaboration >
Browse part two – Donatello: Legacy and Inspiration >

If you would like to read content from Sculpture Journal you can recommend a subscription to your librarian using our online form.

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