ABRAHAM AND ISAAC
CAMPANILE, FLORENCE
Abraham and the Sense of Proportion.
The statue of Abraham and Isaac on the east side of the Campanile is interesting as being the first group made by Donatello. The subject had already been treated by Brunellesco and Ghiberti in relief. Donatello had to make his figures on a larger scale. Abraham is a tall, powerful man with a long flowing beard, looking upwards as he receives the command to sheath the dagger already touching the shoulder of his son. The naked boy is kneeling on his left leg and is modelled with a good deal of skill, though, broadly speaking, the treatment is rather archaic in character. It is a tragic scene, in which the contrast of the inexorable father and the resigned son is admirably felt. Donatello had to surmount a technical difficulty, that of putting two figures into a niche only intended for one. His sense of proportion enabled him to make a group in harmony with its position and environment. It fits the niche. Statues are so often unsuited to their niches; scores of examples could be quoted from Milan Cathedral alone where the figures are too big or too small, or where the base slopes downwards and thus fails to give adequate support to the figure. There is an old tradition which illustrates Donatello's aptitude for grouping. Nanni di Banco had to put four martyrs into a niche of Or San Michele, and having made his statues found it impossible to get them in. Donatello was invoked, and by removing a superfluous bit of marble here, and knocking off an arm there, the four figures were successfully grouped together. The statues, it must be admitted, show no signs of such usage, and Nanni was a competent person: but the story would not have been invented unless Donatello had been credited in his own day with the reputation of being a master of proportion and grouping. Donatello, however, never really excelled in the free standing group. His idea was a suite or series of figures against a background, a bas-relief. The essential quality of a group is that there should be something to unite the figures. We find this in the Abraham, but the four martyrs by Nanni di Banco are standing close together as if by chance, and cannot properly be called a group in anything but juxtaposition of figures. Il Rosso helped to make Abraham. The commission was given jointly to the two sculptors in March 1421, and the statue was finished, with unusual expedition, by November of the same year. The hand of Rosso cannot be easily detected except in the drapery, which differs a good deal from Donatello's. The latter must have been chiefly responsible for the grouping and wholly so for the fine head of Abraham.
Drapery and Hands.
Rosso's drapery was apt to be treated in rather a small way with a number of little folds. Donatello, on the other hand, often tended to the opposite extreme, and in the Campanile figures we see the clothes hanging about the prophets in such ample lines that the Zuccone and Jeremiah are overweighted with togas which look like heavy blankets. Habbakuk and the Baptist are much more skilfully draped, deference being shown to the anatomy. "To make drapery merely natural," said Sir Joshua Reynolds, "is a mechanical operation to which neither genius nor taste are required: whereas it requires the nicest judgment to dispose the drapery so that the folds have an easy communication, and gracefully follow each other with such natural negligence as to look like the effect of chance, and at the same time show the figure under it to the utmost advantage."[27] The sculptors of the fifteenth century did not find it so easy to make drapery look purely natural, and we are often confronted by cases where they failed in this respect. It arose partly from a belief that drapery was nothing more than an accessory, partly also from their ignorance of what was so fully realised by the Greeks, that there can be very little grace in a draped figure unless there are the elements of beauty below. Another comment suggested by Donatello's early work in marble is that he was not quite certain how to model or dispose the hands. They are often unduly big; Michael Angelo started with the same mistake: witness his David and the Madonna on the Stairs. It was a mistake soon rectified in either case. But till late in life Donatello never quite succeeded in giving nerve or occupation to his hands. St. Mark, St. Peter, and St. John all have a book in their left hands, but none of them hold the book; it has no weight, the hand shows no grip and has no sense of possession. Neither did Donatello always know where to put the hands, giving them the shy and self-conscious positions affected by the schoolboy. The Bargello David is a case in point. His hands are idle, they have really nothing to do, and their position is arbitrary in consequence. It is all a descent from the Gothic, where we find much that is inharmonious and paradoxical, and a frequent lack of concord between the component parts. St. George, standing erect in his niche, holds the shield in front of him, its point resting on the ground. But, notwithstanding the great progress made by Donatello in modelling these hands—(so much indeed that one might almost suspect the bigger hands of contemporary statues to be faithful portraits of bigger hands)—one feels that the shield does not owe its upright position to the constraint of the hands. They do not reflect the outward pressure of the heavy shield, which could almost be removed without making it necessary to modify their functions or position. It was reserved for Michael Angelo to achieve the unity of purpose and knowledge needed in portraying the human hand. He was the first among Italian sculptors to render the relation of the hand to the wrist, the wrist to the forearm, and thence to the shoulder and body. In the fifteenth century nobody fully understood the sequence of muscles which correlates every particle of the limb, and Donatello could not avoid the halting and inconclusive outcome of his inexperience.
Minor Works for the Cathedral.
There remain a few minor works for the Cathedral which require notice. In October 1421 an unfinished figure by Ciuffagni was handed over to Donatello and Il Rosso. It is probable that Dr. Semper is correct in thinking that this may be the statue on the East side of the Cathedral hitherto ascribed to Niccolo d'Arezzo, though it can hardly be the missing Joshua. We have here a middle-aged man with a long beard, his head inclined forward and supported by his upraised hand with its forefinger extended. Donatello was fond of youth, but not less of middle age. With all their power these prophets are middle-aged men who would walk slowly and whose gesture would be fraught with mature dignity. Donatello did not limit to the very young or the very old the privilege of seeing visions and dreaming dreams. Two other statues by Donatello have perished. These are Colossi,[28] ordered probably between 1420 and 1425, and made of brick covered with stucco or some other kind of plaster. They stood outside the church, on the buttress pillars between the apsidal chapels. One of them was on the north side, as an early description mentions the "Gigante sopra la Annuntiata,"[29] that is above the Annunciation on the Mandorla door. The perishable material of these statues was selected, no doubt, owing to the difficulty and expense of securing huge monoliths of marble. In this case one must regret their loss, as the distance from which they would be seen would amply justify their heroic dimensions. But the idea of Colossi, which originated in Egypt and the East, is to astonish, and to make the impression through the agency of bulk. The David by Michael Angelo is great in spite of its unwieldiness. Michael Angelo himself was under no illusions about these Colossi. His letter criticising the proposal to erect a colossal statue of the Pope on the Piazza of San Lorenzo is in itself a delightful piece of humour, and ridiculed the conceit with such pungency that the project was abandoned. Finally, Donatello made two busts of prophets for the Mandorla door. The commission is previous to May 1422, when it is noted that Donatello was to receive six golden florins for his work. They are profile heads carved in relief upon triangular pieces of marble, which fill two congested architectural corners. They look like the result of a whim, and at first sight one would think they were ordered late in the history of the door to supplement or replace something unsatisfactory. But this is not the case. Half corbel and half decoration, they are curious things: one shows a young man, the other an older bearded man. Both have long hair drawn back by a fillet, and in each case one hand is placed across the breast. They have quite a classical look, and are the least interesting as well as the least noticeable of the numerous sculptures made for the Cathedral by Donatello. The Domopera evidently appreciated his talent. To this day, besides these busts and the two small prophets, there survive at least nine marble figures made for the Duomo, some of them well over life size. There were also the Colossi, and it will be seen later on that the Domopera gave him further commissions for bronze doors, Cantoria, altar and stained glass; he also was employed as an architectural expert. Years of Donatello's life were spent on the embellishment of Santa Maria del Fiore, a gigantic task which he shared with his greatest predecessors and his most able contemporaries. The task, indeed, was never fully accomplished. The Campanile is not crowned by the spire destined for it by Giotto: the façade has perished and the interior is marred by the errors of subsequent generations. But the Cathedral of Florence must nevertheless take high rank among the most stately churches of Christendom.