Italian sculptor. He was the most imaginative and versatile Florentine sculptor of the early Renaissance, famous for his rendering of human character and for his dramatic narratives.
He achieved these ends by studying ancient Roman sculpture and amalgamating its ideas with an acute and sympathetic observation of everyday life. Together with Alberti, Brunelleschi, Masaccio and Uccello, Donatello created the Italian Renaissance style, which he introduced to Rome, Siena and Padua at various stages of his career. He was long-lived and prolific: between and there are documentary references to him, some for nearly every year.
This would have given him a grounding in Late Gothic style design as practised by Ghiberti and in the techniques of modelling in wax and clay, in preparation for casting in bronze. However, Ghiberti was not a marble-carver and Donatello must have acquired this skill elsewhere, probably in the flourishing workshops of Florence Cathedral, where his earliest documented sculptures, two small marble statues of Prophets for the Porta della Mandorla , are found.
Two years later, in , Donatello was commissioned to carve a full-size marble statue of David Florence, Bargello to crown one of the cathedral buttresses. This was his first major statue and took several years to carve. It was painted, gilded and set on a pedestal inlaid with mosaic and must have looked highly ornamental. This would have appealed to the then current taste for Late Gothic art.
All traces of colour are now lost and the statue looks rather bland. Also in , Donatello was the youngest of four sculptors to receive a commission to carve an over life-size seated figure of an Evangelist for each of the four niches flanking the great western portal of Florence Cathedral see Florence Cathedral Duomo.
