Donatello: sculpting the Renaissance at the V&A review - miraculous marble, breathtaking bronze

This exhibition – the first major show in Britain to focus on the Renaissance master Donatello – begins and ends with David, the youth who slew Goliath, and rarely has there been such a slender, graceful victor. The first is marble, with elegant Grecian face and insolent pose, one of the sculptor’s first civic commissions, for Florence cathedral. At his feet is the head of the Philistine, looking for all the world as if he were asleep, David’s catapult resting on his head with the rock ready inside.

The other David, at the end, is famously nude (the first entirely naked male figure of the Renaissance), all the more surprising because he’s wearing a hat like the god Mercury, his hand on his hip: the most beautiful statue made since antiquity.

The first David is the original work by Donatello, the second is one of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s famous Victorian plaster casts, given the appearance of bronze. I saw the original statue a few months ago in the Bargello in Florence, and you know what? If you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell the difference.

This exhibition has it all: something old, something new, something borrowed and a number of very good copies. Plus pieces that may have been Donatello but may have been from his workshop, or were designed by him and executed by another hand. That’s how things worked then.

There can be few subjects so well suited to the V&A, which has the largest collection of Italian Renaissance statuary outside Italy. Cultural appropriation? Yep, that was the whole idea. The exhibition has a particular eye to the making of Donatello’s works – design and craft is the V&A’s business. And there’s interesting documentation on his sharing of a workshop and its profits.

But it focuses too on the purpose of his art: evoking religious emotion, a sense of identification with Christ, the Virgin and the saints. Intriguingly, the show suggests that this may have been influenced by the mystery plays – street theatre on sacred themes – which did the same thing. And there can be few more moving evocations of the humanity of the infant Christ than Donatello’s Pazzi Madonna, a ‘sticciato’ marble relief (a technique which involves carving just millimetres into the surface) showing him and the Virgin with their noses squashed against each other.

There are several beautiful Virgins here, one of the finest being the Madonna of the Clouds, executed in this low relief that Donatello perfected, conveying a sense of depth and movement by scraping away just a fraction of an inch of marble surface.

He also transformed the reliquary – which holds the remains of a saint – from idealised form into portrait bust; the bronze St Luxurius (good name) shows the Roman soldier-martyr as a contemplative Renaissance gentleman, with a justifiably sombre expression.

One treasure, a coup for the museum, is an altarpiece from the church of St Anthony of Padua, normally out of view, showing the miracle whereby a hungry donkey was presented with two options: a tasty bale of hay or worshipping the Eucharist in the saint’s hand. It knelt before the host. Around donkey and saint are gathered umpteen spectators, spilling out of their panels, peering round pillars to get a better view. It’s a rare treat to see this up close.

Then of course there are classical pieces, one being a jaunty little winged figure in bronze, Attis-Amorino, a composite figure, all the more naked for wearing leggings suspended from a belt. Donatello rejoiced in his spiritelli, a cross between little angels and the putti on classical monuments; there are lots of cheerful dancing ones.

This is a show not to miss – but one of the finest things in it is here to stay. The marvellous, subtly undulating low relief of the Ascension is part of the V&A’s permanent collection. When this exhibition is over, come and look at this, again and again.

V&A, from February 11 to June 11; vam.ac.uk