Age cannot wither him, nor custom stale
David Ekserdjian
So linked is Sir John Pope-Hennessy's name with the study of sculpture, that it is easy to forget that his first love was paint- ing, in particular Sienese quattrocento painting. It is hard to imagine what he made of Donatello's 'Feast of Herod' in the Baptistery and 'Baptist' in the Cathedral at Siena when researching his books on Giovanni di Paolo and Sassetta, but it seems inconceivable that he was ever anything other than wide-ranging in his aesthetic enthusiasms. Maybe that is why, more than half a century on, his mono- graph on Donatello is so very good. For Donatello, who was arguably the 15th- century's greatest genius, and indisputably its greatest sculptor, also possessed to a supreme degree the quality Gainsborough admired in Reynolds, namely variety.
It might be tempting to suppose that there is nothing new to be said about an artist of Donatello's stature, but happily the opposite is the case. Pope-Hennessy shows a particularly admirable reluctance to regard his own previous judgments as written on tablets of stone: he no longer believes the marble David in the Barge'to was originally made for Florence Cathedral, concedes that the bronze David (also in the Barge11o) is indeed a David with the head of Goliath not a Mercury with the head of Argus, and finally accepts that the Lille 'Feast of Herod' is by Donatello. If, on balance, this represents a tamed response to certain controversies, then it would nevertheless be a grave error to imagine that there are no unexpected insights on offer.
Pope-Hennessy belongs to an almost vanished school of connoisseurs of sculp- ture, who hold that the judgment of the eye can separate sheep from goats, not only when it comes to invention, but also when it comes to execution. There is no notion of the artist — or the scholar — having an off day here, and the results are particularly apparent in the discussion of the Santo altar and the San Lorenzo 'pulpits' (Pope- Hennessy doubts that the reliefs that were posthumously mounted as pulpits were originally intended for such a destination). Some elements were entirely Donatello's work, others were worked up by lesser hands from his designs, while still others were entirely the work of pupils. The Donatello who emerges from this analysis is a quitter on a heroic scale, and in that respect a precursor of Leonardo. He is also, and more rewardingly, surely the first artist to have what the Germans call an Altersstil (old age style), in which he goes his own way regardless of surrounding fashion.
Donatello's greatness is in part a func- tion of his variety, as he responded to the demands of different media, locations, and patrons, and proved himself as much at home in bronze as marble, indoors as out, elsewhere as in Florence. He combined an overpowering and instantly recognisable artistic personality with awesome stylistic diversity, and at the same time he thought long and hard about the inner life of his creations. Pope-Hennessy is almost unbeatable when it comes to intellectual rigour, but some of the best, as well as the most affecting writing in this magisterial book is inspired by the intensely emotional presences that Donatello brought into being. True or not, the anecdote about the sculptor shouting at one of his creations and ordering it to speak is benissimo trovato.
Nicholas Penny is currently Clore Curator in Renaissance Art at the National Gallery, but his doctorate and the book that came out of it were devoted to sculpture. Already the victim of not a little narrow-minded envy on account of his protean range of interests and energy, in The Materials of Sculpture he has excelled himself in the art of asking for trouble. Penny does not attempt to be absolutely exhaustive, with the result that there is no discussion of Easter Island heads at one extreme, or of Marc Quinn's cast of his head in his own frozen blood at the other, but most forms of substance are consid- ered. The progress is from the hardest stones by way of marble on to wood and ivory before reaching clay, wax and finally bronze and other metals, in other words from carving to modelling. The examples chosen are by no means exclusively European, and we are treated to fascinat- ing passages on Benin bronzes and Chinese jades, Japanese ivory netsuke and Khmer sandstone gods. The idea is to hammer away at the simple but crucial point that in sculpture, in a way that is not true in flat art, the medium is not far off being the message, and tends to play a considerable part in determining what a given piece looks like. As Penny's first sentence has it:
If we are to understand a work of art, it obvi- ously helps to have some knowledge of the material of which it is made.
No one could deny the good sense of this, but it would be intriguing to know what Penny has to say about the counter- examples, which exemplify what might be termed falsehood to materials. In renais- sance Germany, sculptors made wooden models for bronzes, in 17th- and 18th- century Italy, France, England, and else- where they produced full-scale terracottas to prepare their marbles, while in ancient Rome they made marble copies of Greek bronzes, and in their turn these marbles were reproduced in the renaissance and later as bronzes. All food for thought, no doubt, but there is more than enough to be getting on with in this remarkable volume, which contains facts galore, quirky apergus on every page, as well as some unexpected- ly poetic passages of description. I cannot imagine anyone else having the chutzpah to attempt a book on this subject, and while I have no doubt that all manner of objec- tions will be raised to individual observa- tions, the author should not be downcast, for the good reason that he has never done anything better.
Terracotta Madonna and Child (Muse e de Louvre), from Donatello Sculptor
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