-
Random History
- Failure in Poland, Italy, and Germany | The Revolutions of 1830
- The North Atlantic Powers | European Exploration and Expansion
- The Expansion of Russia, to 1682 | The Late Middle Ages in Eastern Europe
- Progress and Pessimism in the 17th Century | The Problem of Divine-Right Monarchy
- The Dutch Republic, 1602-1672 | The Great Powers in Conflict
- The Polish and Ottoman Victims | The Old Regimes
- Frederick the Great, r. 1740-1786 | The Enlightenment
- French Leadership | The Enlightenment
- German National Awakening | Napoleon and Europe
- Italy from Theodoric to Pepin, 527-768 | The Early Middle Ages in Western Europe
-
Recent Comments
- Scozyjof-online on Le Grand Monarque
- Agnes on Nobles and Serfs, 1730-1762 | The Enlightenment
- Rolanda on Nobles and Serfs, 1730-1762 | The Enlightenment
- Denali on Twentieth Century Thought and Letters
- LOL on A Second Step: German Rearmament, 1935-1936 | The Second World War
- Bree on France After World War One | The Democracies
- Chumani on Music | The Renaissance
- Finn on Dazzling the Barbarian
- Suki on Conflict in Asia, 1953-1970 | The Second World War
- Marmara on Oliver Cromwell
Tags
Between The World Wars Byzantium and Islam Church and Society in the Medieval West European Exploration and Expansion Judaism and Christianity Modern Empires and Imperialism Romanticism, Reaction, and Revolution The Beginnings of the Secular State The Democracies The Early Middle Ages in Western Europe The Enlightenment The First Civilizations The First World War The French Revolution The Great Powers in Conflict The Greeks The Industrial Society The Late Middle Ages in Eastern Europe The Late Twentieth Century The Modernization of Nations The Non-Western World The Old Regimes The Problem of Divine-Right Monarchy The Protestant Reformation The Renaissance The Rise of the Nation The Romans The Russian Revolution of 1917 The Second World War The Written Record Twentieth-Century Thought and LettersPages
Sculpture | The Renaissance
Renaissance sculpture and painting were closely related, and Italian pictures owed some of their three-dimensional quality to the artists’ study of sculpture. The first Renaissance sculptor was Donatello (1386-1466), whose statue of the condottiere Gattamelata in Padua was even then a landmark in the history of art.
The subject is secular, the treatment classical. Donatello created the first statue of a nude male since antiquity, a bronze David who, however, looked more like a handsome youth than the inspired slayer of Goliath. Yet Donatello’s wooden statue of Mary Magdalene, all lank hair and skin and bones, was a saint who looked the part.
Still another gifted Florentine, Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488), extended the concern for social and political realism. His statue of the condottiere Colleoni in Venice, mounted on a muscular horse, is more dynamic than Donatello’s Gattamelata. Painter, goldsmith, teacher of Leonardo, and student of architecture, geometry, music, and philosophy, Verrocchio ranked among the universal men of the Renaissance. So did Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), goldsmith, engraver, devotee of high living, and author of a noted autobiography. Cellini boasted as patrons two popes as well as King Francis I of France and the Medici duke of Tuscany, who commissioned an elegant statue of Perseus (1553) holding aloft the head of Medusa.
Florence commissioned Michelangelo’s colossal statue of David, a muscular nude more than sixteen feet high, fashioned from an enormous block of marble abandoned by another sculptor. Michelangelo went on to carry sculpture to a summit it had not attained since the age of Pericles. He showed his ingenuity in solving technical problems with his Pieta (c. 1499), in St. Peter’s, which shows the Virgin mourning the dead Christ. It was exceedingly difficult to pose a seated woman with a limp adult body across her lap, yet Michelangelo succeeded triumphantly.