DONATO DI NICCOLÒ DI BETTO, KNOWN AS DONATELLO

Donatello’s San Lorenzo is one of the very few completely new and therefore noteworthy additions made this century to the catalogue of the greatest sculptor of the Italian Renaissance (for a longer essay that includes sources for all references made in this text see Caglioti, 2014, op. cit.). Its historical significance is highly compelling for at least two reasons, which relate as much to the material used (terracotta) as to the bust format and the location for which the work was originally intended.

I shall return to these aspects at the end of this entry, but first there are the intriguing vicissitudes of the San Lorenzo over the last century and half to consider, as well as the material changes it has undergone, and its unusual critical fortune. As is almost always the case in art history, these strands are tightly interwoven and help to understand why it was not until 2014 that the authorship and importance of the San Lorenzo was revealed, despite the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century it was known to and passed through the hands of some of the main figures involved in dealing and collecting Italian Renaissance art in Europe: most notably those of Stefano Bardini, Wilhelm Bode and Johann II, Prince of Liechtenstein.

The San Lorenzo was sold in 1889 by Bardini to Johann II, one of the richest, most discerning and sensitive collectors and patrons of his time, and a regular client of the dynamic, even unscrupulous Florentine antiquarian. The bust bore no indication of provenance nor an attribution, and its price was therefore set at a level reflecting this lack of information. However, the provenance was well-known to the seller, who chose to keep it to himself given that the San Lorenzo was from the façade of a renowned public church in the Florence area. This fact remained concealed, and came to light only in 2014.

Wilhelm Bode, the indefatigable director of the Berlin Museums, drew close to attributing the bust. As well as being the foremost art connoisseur of his era and an uncontested pioneer of Italian Renaissance sculpture studies, he was also a direct contact of Bardini, thanks to his role in acquiring works of art for the Berlin Museums and in advising Johann II and other major collectors influenced by his taste. Bode judged the San Lorenzo a ‘treffliche Halbfigur’ (an outstanding half-figure), ‘dem Donatello ganz nahe stehend’ (very near to Donatello), without ever committing to even a tentative attribution to the master (Bode, 1895, op. cit., pp. 122, 128-129, and Bode, 1896, op. cit., pp. 124, 131). This lack of vision explains why, although a passionate admirer of Donatello, he did not rush to purchase the object for the public collections in Berlin, allowing it to pass to his second choice of buyer, Johann II.

Bode’s attitude is easily clarified by the fact that, at that time, there was already another terracotta portrait of the young Roman deacon and martyr of Spanish origin that was deemed to hold a central role in the oeuvre of Donatello: the famous half-bust in the Sagrestia Vecchia of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence. The substantial presence of this terracotta among the presumed autograph works of Donatello remained undebated until 1957-1958, when Horst W. Janson and Margrit Lisner, arriving at the same conclusion simultaneously and independently, recognised it as a masterpiece by Desiderio da Settignano (H.W. Janson, The Sculpture of Donatello, 2 vols., Princeton, 1957, vol. 2, pp. 236-237 and pls. 489-491; and M. Lisner, ‘Die Büste des heiligen Laurentius in der Alten Sakristei von S. Lorenzo: Ein Beitrag zu Desiderio da Settignano’, in Zeitschrift für Kunstwissenschaft, 12, 1958, pp. 51-70). Since then this shift of autorship has been accepted several times in studies, and is now definitively confirmed thanks to a payment made in 1462 which demonstrates that the San Lorenzo (significantly also known as San Leonardo because, unlike Donatello’s San Lorenzo, this youth in deacon’s vestments has no other iconographical attributes) was originally a portrait of James of Portugal (1433-1459), cardinal deacon of Sant’Eustachio. The representation of this prince of the Church who was also a prince of the royal house of Portugal, celebrated for his austerity and his virginity, was modelled by Desiderio either in 1459, when James, who was on his way through Florence, died prematurely and was buried there, or soon after his death. It must then have been transferred to the basilica of San Lorenzo through the intervention of one of the patrician Florentine families (such as the Medici, the Martelli or the Cambini) who had chapels there and had been closely connected to James. Installing the bust in the church was enough to transform a secular portrait into a devotional one and a cult object, without any material adjustment, and so guaranteeing its survival for centuries (Caglioti, 2014, op. cit., p. 8 and notes 16-19 [p. 82], and p. 15, fig. 11; Caglioti, 2021, op. cit.).

At the time that Desiderio’s San Lorenzo was conclusively dropped from Donatello studies, in 1957-1958, no one remembered or knew of Johann II’s San Lorenzo, even though it had been on public display in the Liechtenstein summer palace at Rossau near Vienna until 1938. It had even been given particular prominence by the prince among the countless treasures shown in those sumptuous rooms. Johann II had made other purchases from Bardini which, unlike the San Lorenzo, had been paid for as autograph works by Donatello but which had then turned out to be flawed, in style or quality. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a similar downgrading was reaffirmed for the San Lorenzo each time the specialists (of whom there were few) and the guidebook authors (of whom there were many) had the opportunity to review the Liechtenstein collections without any editorial control from the family (I refer by way of example only to Suida, 1904, op. cit., p. 69, unillustrated). Meanwhile, Johann II, swept up in his personal and genuine taste, began to believe the San Lorenzo to be a work by Donatello and, as such, chose it to represent his passion for collecting at a major retrospective exhibition organised in St Petersburg in 1904 under the patronage of the Tsarina Alexandra Fjodorovna in aid of soldiers wounded in the war between Russia and Japan (Prachoff, 1907, op. cit., p. 9).

In order to reflect the prince’s disposition, authors in his circle, whether biographers of Johann II or those cataloguing the Liechtenstein collections, repeated the attribution to Donatello, which can only be traced within their bibliographies. After the palace at Rossau was closed to the public in 1938, the San Lorenzo, which had never featured in studies on Italian sculpture of the Renaissance, disappeared even from the Liechtenstein literature. It resurfaced only in 2003 in Amsterdam, at a Sotheby’s auction of art objects being disposed of by the dynasty. Ahead of the re-opening of the Rossau palace to visitors in 2004, the present Liechtenstein family had decided to refocus and expand traditional strands of their centuries-old collecting activities (for example, the European Baroque), scaling down such areas as the sculpture and applied arts of the early Italian Renaissance, which had been of special interest to Johann II.

At the 2003 auction the San Lorenzo was offered as ‘an Italian polychrome terracotta and plaster bust of St. Lawrence, 19th century, in Renaissance style’, ‘inspired by the bust of St. Leonard by Donatello in the Old Sacristy, San Lorenzo, Florence’ (‘Of Royal and Noble Descent’, 2003, op. cit., p. 69, lot 194, with photograph). The cataloguing description was indeed careless, given that it was almost fifty years since it had been established that the half-bust in the Sagrestia Vecchia was not by Donatello, but also because the two works have nothing in common beyond the material of which they are made, their age and place of production (at least in my opinion), and the fact that each shows a young deacon. Nevertheless, the even more eccentric dating of the Liechtenstein San Lorenzo to the nineteenth century might paradoxically have seemed likely, as the appearance of the terracotta bust was now remarkably different to its state when with Bardini, and then with Johann II. In 1955 (the date added to the lower part of the back in the hollow inside the torso) it had unnecessarily and inexplicably been repainted, and a ‘restorer’ had made some changes to the details of the ecclesiastical vestment, which he had completely misunderstood. In doing this he removed some distinctive features of Donatello’s ingenious invention.

Thanks to the photographs taken for Bardini and the Liechtenstein collection between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, it is possible to see that at that time the San Lorenzo showed mild but unmistakable signs of having been exposed at length to the elements (in particular the flaking of the skin surface of the tonsure). The beautiful adolescent deacon, animated by a fervid and heroic vocation for martyrdom worthy of comparison with such memorable masterpieces by Donatello as the San Giorgio from the Orsanmichele in Florence and the San Daniele in the basilica of the Santo in Padua, was so fixated on what lay before him – both his own glorious sacrifice and his public audience – that he was unaware that the knots and tassels of his dalmatic vestment were coming untied on the right side of his chest. It was not until almost two centuries later that Gianlorenzo Bernini would arrive at such modes of expression in his sculpture, in the ecclesiastical robes of Cardinal Scipione Borghese and other great prelates. In 1955, however, the clumsy ‘restorer’ detached the higher of these tassels slipping down the chest of the San Lorenzo and repositioned it further up at the same level as the upper tassel on the left side. The tip of the martyr’s palm held in his right hand had at some point been broken and the traces of its absence were still visible between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the area of the new attachment. So, in similar vein, the ‘restorer’ covered them by gluing the higher tassel on top and partially filling in the tip of the palm.

In 2014 I published the first photographs of the San Lorenzo as part of my reconstruction of the history of the bust, not just from 1889 onwards, but from much earlier. The ‘Pieve’ of San Lorenzo in Borgo San Lorenzo, at the heart of the Mugello area in the northern part of the province of Florence, is key to both parts of the story. A prominent Romanesque building (with much earlier origins), the ‘Pieve’ (that is, a chief church in a large rural district) gave its name of San Lorenzo to the village (‘Borgo’) that grew up around it. During the fifteenth century it was mainly entrusted, for both its spiritual and temporal care, to a succession of senior Florentine clerics attached to the chapter of canons of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, or even to the papal Curia in Rome. The case of the latter is true for Leon Battista Alberti, who was ‘pievano’ (dean) of Borgo, possibly from 1449, until his death, in 1472.

Amongst the furnishings added to the church during the early Renaissance is a San Lorenzo in terracotta that has provided the few scholars researching the topic with some trouble, since there are two versions of it that are almost twins. The first version, currently unpainted, is set in the lunette above the main door. The second is a variant in painted polychrome, which was for a long time kept in the sacristy and is now placed upon the third altar in the righthand nave. It has never been possible to determine which is the original and which the replica. Piecing together the views of the very few experts who have referred to the Borgo San Lorenzo after venturing into this part of Tuscany, off the beaten track of international tourism, we discover that in 1892 Hans Semper, the author of the first Donatello monographs (1875, 1887), thought that he could see in the exterior terracotta (then painted grey) a sculpture ‘by Donatello or his workshop’, in stone (Semper, 1892, op. cit., p. 426). By contrast, in 1933, Ugo Procacci, who, as an official of the Florentine Soprintendenza, had a thorough knowledge of the contents of the ‘Pieve’, believed that the terracotta inside the church (of which Semper was unaware) was the original and that the San Lorenzo on the exterior must be a ‘nineteenth-century cast’ taken from it. Procacci considered the polychrome bust to be in the manner of Donatello and hoped that he might be uncovering the work of a ‘notevole artista della sua cerchia’ – a gifted artist in his circle, disfigured by later repaintings (Procacci, 1933, op. cit., p. 434 and note 1, and p. 438, fig. 6). But the attempts made in the meantime to salvage a Renaissance original from beneath the layers of pigment have not produced the hoped-for results. In fact, the clumsiness of the modelling (of the ears for example) is enough to condemn the polychrome San Lorenzo at first glance – and with no hope of reprieve. The bust on the façade, however, is much more successful and expressive, even if on close inspection it betrays the simplification so typical of many replicas.

The conundrum of the two San Lorenzo twins at Borgo is ultimately solved thanks to the Liechtenstein San Lorenzo, which, apart from declaring itself by virtue of its quality, is, following careful consideration, revealed to be the prototype for both the Borgo versions. Knowledge of the existence of all three objects is all that was needed to come to this conclusion, but even though I had been brooding over this certainty for many years after seeing in 1990 two old images of what was then the Liechtenstein San Lorenzo in the historic photo library of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello (Planiscig collection; Caglioti, 2014, op. cit., esp. p. 13, fig. 9, and p. 17, fig. 13), I had to wait for the direct examination of the work after 2003 to resolve any doubts. The context and circumstances in which the link between the three terracottas originated are finally explained by a number of documents collated from Florentine public historical collections, including the former state Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici, the Archivio Arcivescovile and the Archivio Storico dell’Eredità di Ugo Bardini. Together they demonstrate that by 1865 the ‘Pieve’ of Borgo had, for some long time, kept the inferior polychrome bust (which is now in the church) in the sacristy, while an alter ego ‘in uncoloured terracotta’ was set above the main door. In 1874 the latter was described as ‘very old’, on account not only of the effects of the weather on it, but also of the consistent way it related to the lunette (which was later remodelled following an earthquake in 1919). Documents from 1889, 1893, 1904, 1914 and 1931 testify that in 1888 the exterior version ‘venne radicalmente restaurato sotto il vicario spirituale di questa chiesa canonico Vittorio del Corona’ (was radically restored during the incumbency of Canon Vittorio del Corona as the dean of Borgo) (1914) in a way that it was ‘deturpato dall’applicazione... di una tinta a polvere d’argento’ (disfigured by the application . . . of a paint made of powdered silver) (1889), ‘a imitazione [di] bronzo antico’ (in imitation of antique bronze) (1914), which was then re-applied in 1906 (1914). The bust above the main portal of the ‘Pieve’ still bears traces of this false bronzing, which are not visible but are definitely there, although the terracotta has been stripped of most of it in recent decades, re-emerging perfectly intact. This indicates that the present San Lorenzo is not the one considered ‘very old’ in 1874, and ‘radically restored’ in 1888. The so-called ‘restoration’ can mean only that the original was replaced with a copy, as was common at that time for outdoor sculptures.

In 1888 precisely, Bardini, an antique dealer so skilful that he was one step ahead of scholars in exploring lesser-known areas like the Mugello, sent one of his agents, Domenico Magno, to Borgo San Lorenzo in search of artworks. In 1889 Magno was in correspondence with Canon Vittorio del Corona: it appears that the priest had recently been engaged in some sort of commercial exchange with him and had been left feeling suspicious or at least annoyed. The coincidence in the timing between the ‘radical restoration’ of the San Lorenzo on the façade of the ‘Pieve’, Magno’s trip to Borgo, his business meeting with the priest, the arrival of a San Lorenzo with Bardini and its almost immediate onward consignment to Prince Johann II, is too perfect to allow room for doubt. The relationships in the dimensions and detailing, but also in quality and style, between the three terracotta busts considered here, confirm that the San Lorenzo which emigrated to Vienna was the same one which had been set above the main door of the ‘Pieve’ and that it was substituted in 1888 with a copy, made for this purpose, according to Bardini’s customary methods (which he used elsewhere in the Mugello). The version that was subsequently installed on the façade (height 66 cm), while smaller than the ex-Liechtenstein one (height 74.5 cm), has the same vestment trimmings, the same gospel cover and almost the same dimensions as the one in the church (height 64 cm), but the openness of his face and his spiritual demeanor could never have been obtained without the luminous example of the Liechtenstein San Lorenzo. The inevitable conclusion, therefore, is that the anonymous sculptor, employed by Bardini in 1888 to make the copy that is now set on the façade, had ample opportunity to handle both the original, and the old version in the sacristy that was derived from it. They were both sent to Florence for a few weeks by Canon Del Corona. It is unclear whether the priest knew of the original’s substitution with the copy commissioned by Bardini, and whether he authorised it in good faith, or if he also, secretly, took the opportunity to gain some financial advantage for his church or himself. In any case, the new San Lorenzo was clearly executed in accordance with the following principles: not to take a cast from the original terracotta for fear of damaging it; to follow the format and details of the old polychrome replica to achieve a complete image with nothing missed out, in order to give the impression that the ‘Pieve’ retained two identical versions – one a precise copy of a surviving prototype; to paint the fake one grey to match the stone portal on the façade and to conceal its very recent manufacture. None of this prevented the skilled craftsman, working in 1888, from getting closer to the character of the original than to the sacristy terracotta, which further perfected the deception (for a second, modern version of the San Lorenzo, now in the Princeton University Art Museum, with possibly similar origins connected to the activities of Bardini, see Caglioti, 2014, op. cit., pp. 40-42 and notes 83-86 [p. 91], and pp. 48-49, figs. 87 and 89).

If the ex-Liechtenstein San Lorenzo is systematically considered alongside Donatello’s mature corpus of work, a striking series of stylistic similarities and common technical and formal detailing emerge. To begin with, the bust has been subjected to an almost imperceptible but decisive anamorphosis, to allow the saint to loom over the heads of the faithful from the lunette of the ‘Pieve’. This is a quintessential ‘must’ in Donatello’s art, from the San Marco in Orsanmichele (circa 1411-1413) to the San Giorgio, from the stone Annunciation over the former Cavalcanti altar in the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence (circa 1433-1435) to the bronze David in the Bargello (circa 1435-1440), and so on. Since there is no space here to present either in words or illustrations all this, nor to note all the anatomical and physiognomic comparisons which are possible, or those parallels relating to gesture or clothing or iconographical attributes, the reader is referred to a fuller account (Caglioti, 2014, op. cit.). I confine myself to selecting just one example, that is the face of the bronze David). The two youths look like brothers or even twins, which, along with many other affinities, suggests a date for the San Lorenzo of around 1440, the end of the long period when Donatello was intensively working for the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and at the high-point of the first major phase of his relationship with the Medici.

There is no reason to imagine that the San Lorenzo (documented in 1865 above the main portal of the ‘Pieve’ consecrated to him, and noted soon after as a feature that had been there for ever) should have changed its location or position over the centuries. The person responsible for the commission of such an object must have been the rector of the church, and the date of around 1440 indicates that the most likely candidate for this task is the Florentine Jacopo di Giovanni Ugolini. Little known until now, he is especially suited to having engaged Donatello for the San Lorenzo as he was simultaneously a canon of Santa Maria del Fiore and an important and longtime official in the papal Curia. The Curia was then based in Florence rather than Rome, and gravitated, therefore, to the Duomo itself, the main site of Donatello’s life and activity throughout those years. Pope Eugene IV, who was himself a patron of the supreme sculptor, nominated Ugolini to the ‘Pieve’ of Borgo in October 1437. Ugolini, in contrast to the majority of his predecessors and successors, was a conscientious advocate of the church: his coat of arms appeared there on the capitals of the sacristy (demolished in 1932-1933) behind the tribune, and still remains above the portal of the tribune itself, which at one time led into his apartments (also demolished ninety years ago). To summarise, Ugolini was the last in a line of high prelates who, in the third and fourth decades of the fifteenth century, made Donatello the sculptor par excellence of the Roman Curia.

Donatello was one of the protagonists in the re-emergence of terracotta as a favored sculptural medium, after centuries in which Western artistic civilisation had abandoned a practice that was so common in the ancient world. His intense commitment to using this material, also for public functions, dates from his early youth right up to his extreme old age, and his contemporaries recognised and admired this output from early on. The following terracottas by his hand survive: numerous examples of the Virgin and Child for private devotion (spread out over his career); six putti atop the aforementioned stone Annunciation in Santa Croce in Florence; and the so-called Forzori Altar in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, that is a model of about 1450 for a monumental project, possibly the bronze altar of Saint Anselm of Lucca for the Cathedral in Mantua. This clearly appears to be a modest group when considering the huge quantity of clay preparatory models that the master and his collaborators would have made over the many decades during which he was working on a very wide range of sculpture in marble and bronze. To all this one should add that already between 1409 and 1412 the young sculptor had produced a half-colossal terracotta statue of Joshua for one of the tribune buttresses around the future dome of the Cathedral in Florence, which vanished between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (for Donatello’s overall contribution to sculpture in terracotta, see Caglioti, 2020, op. cit.). The ex-Liechtenstein San Lorenzo expands our knowledge of the variety of Donatello’s activity in terracotta, both iconographically and typologically, and it also allows us to recover a very rare work that was intended for public display in the open, as the Joshua was.

There are no full and systematic studies on the origin and development of half-figures of saints and other holy characters in Italian sculpture between the late medieval and the early modern era. Their diffusion does surely go back much further than Donatello. The colossal marble busts in the gothic aedicules on the exterior around the Pisa Baptistery, above the second order of blind arcading, are just one example that predates the fifteenth century. They are in part by the hands of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano and their workshop (circa 1270-1280). After precedents such as these, the San Lorenzo, from the lunette above the external architrave of a church portal, stands out because it is among the oldest busts in terracotta to have survived – if not actually the oldest. And although it was conceived for a precise architectural setting, the result is a self-contained and entirely autonomous image. Considered as such, it is an equal to the portrait busts which were promoted as a common genre in the fifteenth century for the first time since the classical era. Significantly, however, all the earliest firm examples of this phenomenon postdate the San Lorenzo.

Francesco Caglioti, August 2021