Donatello, The Miracle of the Mule

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0:00:04.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the Palazzo Strozzi in a special exhibition devoted to the early Italian Renaissance sculptor Donatello, looking at a relief sculpture in bronze that was once part of a large ensemble in Padua at the Basilica of Saint Anthony.

0:00:20.0 Dr. Beth Harris: There he was commissioned to do four life-sized figures, a number of relief sculptures, smaller figures, this major commission where he was able to work in bronze.

0:00:30.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: The Basilica of Saint Anthony is dedicated to an extremely important Franciscan saint who had lived just a little more than a century before this had been made. This is depicting one of the four miracles that is associated with Anthony.

0:00:43.8 Dr. Beth Harris: We see Saint Anthony presenting the consecrated host, that is the bread that’s been blessed for the sacrament of the Eucharist. And he’s offering it to a mule, a mule who is hungry. This is in order to prove to a doubter that the Eucharist is in fact the body of Christ. And that presence of the divine is recognized even by this mule who is hungry but kneels before the bread offered by Saint Anthony.

0:01:11.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: You can see the mule turning its head towards what Saint Anthony holds and turning away from what is perhaps a sheaf of wheat and a platter that presumably held food. And so the donkey is choosing sacred nourishment over earthly nourishment, but that’s only the very center of this image. These figures are surrounded by a multitude in every possible physical position, twisting and turning and craning to see the miracle. And that complexity of human form is structured by this classicizing architectural environment that is rendered in linear perspective.

0:01:47.3 Dr. Beth Harris: And that linear perspective serves to create an illusion of depth. It also helps to bring our eye directly to Saint Anthony, to the miracle that’s being performed. And it helps to convince us, along with the emotions of the figures, that this is a miracle that’s happening before us and makes us feel as though we could have been there. And if we were there, how would we have reacted? Would we have gotten on our knees in a position of prayer? Would we have thrown our arms up in a sense of awe? Would we have turned away and talked to someone who was with us? This whole range of emotional reactions to this miracle. Look at how Donatello is working to connect our space with the space of the figures so that, for example, we have figures on either side of Saint Anthony who stand in front of those pilasters, looking at the event in the center. The mule itself is foreshortened, moving from our space into the fictive space of the relief.

0:02:46.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: It’s interesting that while the event is something that happened at the very end of the period that we often refer to as the medieval, the environment in which we’re seeing the figures is classical, as if this is ancient Rome.

0:02:58.7 Dr. Beth Harris: Each arch is separated by a fluted pilaster with garlands and a lovely capital. We are transported back to Rome, even though, as you said, this was an event that happened in the 13th century. It’s almost impossible to count the figures that are here. There’s crowds of figures, four, five figures deep. And one has to look very carefully to disentangle one from another.

0:03:24.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: Look, for example, at the beautifully classicizing figure of the woman whose drapes flow around her. If you look just under her left arm, you can see the face of a man in profile. He’s got his right hand up, but there’s a hand that doesn’t belong to him that’s just over his forehead. And we have to actually move two figures to the right to find the man to whom that hand belongs. And so there is this entanglement, this density of human drama that exists in the lower part of the panel, while in the upper part, we have the clarity of the classical.

0:03:56.9 Dr. Beth Harris: And the geometry of the classical, the round arches, the squares formed by that grating in the background. But then this chaos of human emotion.

0:04:07.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: And yet this is only one of four major relief panels that likely would have been placed below life-size bronze freestanding sculptures at the altar within an architectural framework, which is lost now with the Virgin and Child in the center.

0:04:22.2 Dr. Beth Harris: So we’re very lucky to see this at this exhibition, but it would certainly have a different effect in the Church of Saint Anthony in Padua, where we could see it with believers and worshippers all around in this entire ensemble that was meant to honor Saint Anthony.

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Donatello, the Renaissance at the Palazzo Strozzi

Donatello—a master at work from the Victoria and Albert Museum

Creighton E. Gilbert, “The Original Assembly of Donatello’s Padua Altar,” Artibus et Historiae, volume 28, number 55 (2007), pp. 11–22.

Geraldine A. Johnson, “Approaching the Altar: Donatello’s Sculpture in the Santo,” Renaissance Quarterly, volume 52, number 3 (1999), pp. 627–66.

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