Donatello, St. Mark, 1411-13, marble, 93″ (236 cm) (Orsanmichele, Florence). Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:03] We’re on the second floor of Orsanmichele. Here, one after the other, are all the monumental sculptures that had once filled the niches outside.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:13] It’s important to remember that Orsanmichele is, in many ways, the place that the Renaissance began in Florence. It began in this space that had both a secular function as a granary, but also a spiritual function.
Dr. Zucker: [0:26] It’s also a church.
Dr. Harris: [0:27] These were sculptures commissioned by the guilds. And so it makes sense that these first Renaissance sculptures would be commissioned not by a church, but by guilds, by these secular organizations.
Dr. Zucker: [0:41] OK, so let’s take one as an example. One of the important guilds in the city were the linen workers. We’re standing in front of Saint Mark, which is this monumental sculpture by Donatello. We know it’s for the linen workers because he is standing on a pillow, presumably made of linen.
Dr. Harris: [0:59] Right. If we think about him outside in that niche and imagine walking by him, you could almost imagine this way that you would relate to him, that you could engage with him right on the streets of Florence, this sense of civic pride, of bringing beauty to the city.
Dr. Zucker: [1:16] There really is a sense of immediacy here. This is Donatello’s brilliance. Here we have a figure that is, first of all, reviving the classical in really important ways. This is a figure that is an incredible early expression of contrapposto that hasn’t been seen with this kind of understanding for a thousand years.
Dr. Harris: [1:34] If we look at so many of the other figures that were created for Orsanmichele, they still have that Gothic sway to the hips, and what Donatello gives us instead is something that looks very much like an ancient Roman sculpture.
Dr. Zucker: [1:48] Look, for instance, at the hips that push to his right. Over the engaged leg, you have the cloth falling in perfect unbroken lines, almost as if that’s the fluting of a classical column.
[2:00] It’s on the other side that you can see the knee breaking the cloth. You can really get a sense, even though it’s under this heavy drapery, you still understand the movement of the body, the turn of the spine, the turn of the hips, the axis of the knees.
Dr. Harris: [2:14] Yeah. Donatello’s borrowing this directly from ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. There’s no other place he could have gotten this from. And so the figure, because of the contrapposto, really looks alive. He looks like he can truly walk. His feet are firmly planted on the ground.
[2:29] The sense that the weight is shifting gives the sense that he could walk at any second. We have an idea of sculpture beginning to be separate from the architecture. Even though he was in a niche and he was intended for the architecture, the contrapposto, the sense of movement, gives us a sense of his autonomy from the architecture.
Dr. Zucker: [2:48] But it’s also the authenticity of his experience. And so it’s a revival of the classical, not only in terms of the mechanics of the body but also in terms of the experience of the individual.
[2:58] You said a moment ago, when we walk down the street and see this figure in a niche, there would be an immediate kind of relationship. Yes, that’s true, but at the same time, he’s seeing further. He’s also seeing past us.
Dr. Harris: [3:11] Right. It’s this bringing together of the spiritual and the human, so close at this moment in the early 15th century in Florence.
Dr. Zucker: [3:20] Look at the face. There’s a kind of intelligence. There’s a kind of internal focus. There’s a kind of awareness that is just piercing, and he’s thinking, he’s reflecting on the Gospels that he holds so easily at his side. Perhaps he’s about to speak them to us.
[3:34] There is this way in which our eyes are drawn up through the plainer quality of the drapery to the more focused handling of the stone near the beard, near his eyes — look at that furrowed brow — so that he’s somebody that we can understand and approach in some real way.
Dr. Harris: [3:51] The sculptures like the ones by Ghiberti that are more in that High Gothic style, the face is often more plain and less individualized, and our focus goes on those decorative forms in the drapery.
Dr. Zucker: [4:04] It’s distracting, in a sense.
Dr. Harris: [4:06] Exactly. And so, we don’t have that human-to-human connection that we’re getting here. Here, instead of focusing on the drapery, although the drapery is fabulous, we look directly at the face, and we see the furrowed brow, the eyes that gaze out, the beard that animates his face and makes it seem even more thoughtful, his receding hairline.
[4:25] Then we look down at his hands, and we can see that Donatello has clearly been thinking about human anatomy. Those are not just generalized shapes for hands, but a sense of bone and muscle and veins, and then down to the feet, firmly planted on the ground.
[4:41] When the Florentines looked up at Saint Mark as they walked, they looked up at him and saw a figure that…
Dr. Zucker: [4:47] It ennobled.
Dr. Harris: [4:48] That ennobled them, that they looked at Saint Mark and could have a sense of their own profound dignity as human beings, as Florentines, in the early 15th century. In a way, Saint Mark is a mirror.
Dr. Zucker: [5:01] Isn’t that exactly what this notion of civic pride that was so tied in to 15th century Florence was really about, this notion that we can rise to our own ideals?
Dr. Harris: [5:12] We can be like the ancient Romans and be virtuous and…
Dr. Zucker: [5:18] Shake off the corruption of the medieval, and in a sense, return to the greatness that man had once known.
[5:24] [music]
A humorous anecdote
Donatello, Saint Mark, 1411-13, marble, 93″ (236 cm) Orsanmichele, Florence (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The sixteenth-century artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari gives us a humorous anecdote about Donatello’s Saint Mark. Supposedly, when the patrons first saw the statue standing on the ground they were displeased with it, but Donatello convinced them to let him install it in its niche, where he would finish working on it. The patrons agreed, the statue was installed, and Donatello covered it up for fourteen days—pretending to work on it but in reality not touching it. When it was finally uncovered, everyone viewed the statue with wonder. The only difference was the installation of the work in its proper context. The artist had included distortions to account for the sculpture being seen from below (in its original location its base would be just above the height of an average person—see image at the bottom of this page). Some of these distortions include a torso and neck that are slightly longer than expected, which would be visually corrected when viewed from below (and the neck is hidden by a flowing beard).
Although Vasari’s story is apocryphal, the visual evidence does suggest that Donatello—in this work and others—was keenly interested in viewer perception. This sensitivity to audience and the ability to manipulate his viewers through his works in stone and bronze are part of what makes him such a distinctive figure—and part of why his Saint Mark still has the ability to astound us with its power and expressiveness.
This over-life-size marble, carved from a single, shallow block of stone, portrays the evangelist Saint Mark standing on a pillow, holding a book in his left hand, staring intently into the distance. Rendering a convincingly soft pillow in marble is a testament to the sculptor’s mastery of the material (and perhaps a reference to the patrons, which we’ll get to later).
Apart from this gaze, his face is defined by a long, intricately carved beard whose wavy curves reach down to the base of his neck. The rich folds of the toga he wears convey the expressiveness of fabric—bunching up at his waist, for instance, and falling dramatically around his legs—while also responding to and suggesting the body underneath. Note, for example, how his left knee—slightly forward—pulls at the garment, and how even when the fabric is piled up, as it is on his hip, it manages to convey the body’s physicality. Consider the extraordinary skill in turning hard stone into something that looks like soft, malleable fabric.
Hand and book (detail), Donatello, Saint Mark, 1411-13, marble, 93″ (236 cm) Orsanmichele, Florence (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Contrapposto
Saint Mark’s stance is classic contrapposto—an Italian word loosely translated as “contrasted” or “opposed” and that refers to a naturalistic way of portraying the human form that originated in ancient Greece. Saint Mark supports his weight primarily on his right leg, a point emphasized by the strong vertical lines of the toga over that leg—lines that seem to mimic the fluting on Greek and Roman columns. The saint’s hips are at a slight angle and his left leg, bent at the knee as though about to step forward, is far more relaxed. His upper body is the opposite: the left arm is engaged in holding his book—a reference to his status as one of the authors of the Gospels—while his right arm hangs loosely at his side. The slight curve to the body, and the use of both active and relaxed elements, gives the figure an easy, natural gracefulness that reflects how a human would actually stand, and makes it appear as though the saint is caught in the act of stepping out of his niche.
All of these formal elements—the scale, the expressive carving, the interest in the body, the contrapposto—are aspects we have come to associate as new developments in the art of the Early Italian Renaissance.
The commission and setting
Reproduction of Donatello’s St. Mark (1411-13, the original is now in the museum inside) in its original location in a niche at Orsanmichele, Florence, 1349 loggia (1380-1404 upper stories) (photo: Shirley de Jong, CC BY-NC 2.0)
St, Mark (reproduction), in his original location, Orsanmichele, Florence, 1349 loggia (1380-1404 upper stories)(photo: Stefan Bauer, CC BY-SA 2.5)
Donatello’s commission for Saint Mark was part of a broader campaign to adorn the exterior of Orsanmichele in Florence, Italy. Orsanmichele is and was a building with both civic and religious importance for Florentine citizens. Though constructed in part as a grain warehouse and used as such for decades, Orsanmichele was also a significant site of pilgrimage and religious devotion, due to the presence of a miracle-working image of the Virgin and Child. Plans to decorate the exterior of the building date back to 1339, when the Silk Guild (the Arte della Seta, then known as the Arte di Por Santa Maria) proposed that they and the other major guilds of Florence adorn the external piers of the building with tabernacles (or niches) and life-sized (or bigger) sculptures of saints. The project was slow to get off the ground—only a few works were completed before it came to a stop—but it was revived in the early fifteenth century. At this point, the city government legislated that the guilds had to decorate their tabernacles within ten years or give up their rights to do so.
Orsanmichele was so important to the city that a guild’s ability to commission an artwork for it was considered an honor—if an expensive one. Although the legislation wasn’t strictly enforced, it did inspire a flurry of activity and commissions around Orsanmichele—of which Donatello’s Saint Mark was one example, commissioned by the Linen Weavers’ Guild (the Arte dei Linaiuoli). Other noteworthy sculptures from this period include Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Saint John the Baptist, c. 1414 and Saint Matthew, c. 1420, Nanni di Banco’s Four Crowned Saints, c. 1415, and Donatello’s Saint George, c. 1415.
Left: Nanni di Banco, Four Crowned Saints, c. 1410-16, marble, figures 6′ high, Orsanmichele, Florence (Italy) (photo: Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0); Right: Donatello, Saint George, c. 1416–17, marble (Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, commissioned by the armorers and sword makers guild for the exterior of Orsanmichele) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The Orsanmichele projects provided an opportunity for the guilds to compete with each other, each one commissioning a more luxurious or impressive sculpture. Competition of all sorts—between patrons, artists, even art forms themselves—is a consistent theme of the Renaissance, and in the opening years of the fifteenth century this was on display as guilds vied for public attention and praise via their Orsanmichele commissions. For example, the Cloth Merchants’ Guild (the Arte di Calimala) commissioned Ghiberti’s Saint John the Baptist in bronze rather than marble—a far more costly decision intended to show off the guild’s wealth and outdo its rivals.
Unfortunately, all of the original statues on Orsanmichele—fourteen works—have been placed in either the building’s museum or the Bargello museum. The sculptures in the niches are copies. The result is that we can now view Donatello’s Saint Mark at ground level—exactly as he did not intend it to be viewed!
The artist
Donatello—whose full name was Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi—was born around 1386 in Florence to a middle-class family. He probably trained as a goldsmith as a young man, and eventually spent some time with two of the most important artists of the fifteenth century: Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti. He went with the former to Rome in the opening years of the century, and he spent time in Ghiberti’s workshop from about 1404 to 1407.
Head (detail), Donatello, Saint Mark, 1411-13, marble, 93″ (236 cm) Orsanmichele, Florence (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By the time of the Saint Mark commission, Donatello had already completed or was at work on several other notable public sculptures, including his marble David (1408-9), Saint John the Baptist (1408-15), and Saint George (c. 1410-15, also for Orsanmichele). These early works—especially Saint John—already exhibit some of the hallmarks of Donatello’s style, including a realism informed by Classical (ancient Greek and Roman) art and a certain psychological intensity. In subsequent decades he would execute original monuments that later generations have come to view as landmarks in Renaissance art: these include the bronze relief of the Feast of Herod for the baptismal font in Siena’s baptistery (c. 1425); the Equestrian Monument of Gattamelata in Padua (c. 1450, the earliest surviving Renaissance equestrian monument); and the Judith and Holofernes (c. 1460), now in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. These works had an impact not only on his peers but on later sculptors, as well—including on Michelangelo, who can be considered the High Renaissance artistic heir to Donatello. Thanks to a career that spanned over sixty years of activity (Donatello lived until 1466) and that resulted in radical works for major cultural and artistic centers—including Florence, Siena, Padua, and Rome—Donatello became an artist whose fame and impact equaled if not surpassed that of his teachers.
