Donato di Niccol di Betto Bardi, universally known as Donatello, was

born in Florence around 1386 and died there in 1466. The powerful
expressivity of his art made him the greatest sculptor of the early
Renaissance. Masterpieces from the first phases of his career include
the vigilant marble

Saint George, made for the guildhall of Orsanmichele (ca. 1417;

Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence); the gilt-bronze Saint
Louis of Toulouse at the Church of Santa Croce, Florence (ca.
142225); and his
bronze
relief of the Feast of Herodand statuettes of angels on the
baptismal font in the Baptistery of Siena (142529). Vasaris
description of the first gives us some idea of the impact on his
contemporaries of the young Donatellos work: There is a
marvelous suggestion of life bursting out of the stone. Two of
his characteristic formal contributions are encountered in the
work for Siena. The relief is organized by a rigorous application
of the rules of perspective that makes each figure emerge clearly
and logically, even though the scene was modeled at a shallow
depth; this is called rilievo schiacciato, or flattened relief. Each
of these angels, of which the best known is now in the Staatliche
Museen, Berlin, is arranged in a graceful spiraling pose, known
as the figura serpentinata, so that the eye is encouraged to move
around the figure and take in the whole.
To his middle period belongs the marble Cantoria, or singing gallery,
with its frieze of frenzied infants (143339; Museo dellOpera del
Duomo, Florence), and the even more famous bronze David, made for
the Medici family (ca. 1440; Bargello, Florence).

From 1443 to 1453, Donatello worked in the northern Italian city of

Padua. There he designed a monumental sculpted high altarpiece for
the church known as the Santo. Although now dismantled, the
overwhelming effect of this sacra conversazione of saints surrounding
the

Virgin and Child, with narrative scenes set below as on a

predella, can readily be imagined. In Padua, he also created a
great bronze equestrian statue of the military commander
Gattamelata (erected 1453), a
revival of an ancient Roman type, and the first such sculpture to
come down from the Renaissance.
Donatello spent his old age in Florence, often working for the Medici.
The twisting, heroic bronze group Judith Slaying Holofernes (Florence,
Palazzo Vecchio) was originally in their palace, and they were also the
patrons of the dramatic bronze reliefs that narrate the
Donatello influenced Italian sculptors, notably Michelangelo, well into
the sixteenth century. His work outside Italy is exceedingly rare; there
is only one relief by him in the United States, a fine marble Madonna
in rilievo schiacciatoin the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The
Metropolitan Museum has only works that benefited from his style, the
best being a fountain figure of a winged infant from the mid-fifteenth
century (