Entranced by Donatello
“Sculpture in the Age of Donatello,” a splendid small show of early-Renaissance Florentine works at the Museum of Biblical Art, on Broadway at Sixty-first Street, impelled me to haul down my very long-neglected copy of the Good Book. What I read—which I’ll get to—startled me. It lends dramatic irony to “Prophet” (1435-36), a statue of an Old Testament minor seer, thought to be Habakkuk, which Donatello created for the bell tower of the Florence Cathedral. It is one of the greatest sculptures in the world, and among the most mysterious.
In gray marble, he stands about six feet tall, a ravaged man of forty-something with a bald and almost, but not quite, impossibly elongated head. (Early on, in Italy, the work acquired the nickname Lo Zuccone, for pumpkin. Its look calls to my mind aspects of El Greco and Giacometti.) He is electrically tense. One hand grips a strap beneath his flowing robe, of which the drape and crumple are rendered with striking economy. (The best of Donatello shares with the classical Greeks and with no one else, Michelangelo included, a confounding unity of earthy realism and refined abstraction.) The other hand clutches the robe’s fabric. You sense from the hands, arms, neck, and one bare shoulder, and the sandalled feet, the whole of a gaunt, sinewy body, which you can all but smell.
He seems anxious, if not anguished: fraught with pent-up emotion. His head tilts forward with eyes wide and the lips of his large mouth parted. He appears about to say something. A legend recounted by Vasari, a century later, has it that Donatello was so affected by the lifelikeness of the statue that, while working on it, “he would look at it and keep muttering, ‘Speak, damn you, speak!’”
