For centuries, Donatello’s “Madonna of Via Pietrapiana” has been hidden in plain sight in the center of Florence. Experts had long believed a follower of the Italian master had created the terracotta bas-relief that was hung high in a tabernacle frame under a street sign on a villa at the address Via Pietrapiana 38. But in 1985, after the work had been restored, writer and art historian Charles Avery attributed the obscure relief to Donatello, as an autographed work. It was the master’s last privately owned work.
‘Madonna of Via Pietrapiana’
Bargello National Museum curator Ilaria Ciseri said in a press release, that as “an image of exquisite charm, the ‘Madonna of Via Pietrapiana’ shows all the expressive power of Donatello’s sculpture and his constant genius in the invention of details.” Donatello changed details of the Madonna and Child composition 30 times or more, according to Neville Rowley, curator of early Italian art at Berlin State Museums.
In the work, Donatello shows us the earthly mother-child bond but also their divinity. See how the Virgin gazes at her son, fully aware that she must ultimately let him go to fulfill his sacred mission. See how her hands pull the swaddled Christ close to her. Donatello rendered exquisite details, such as a seraph on the center of the Virgin’s cloak, the complex drapery of her robes and Christ’s swaddling cloth, and the almost alchemical way that he made clay appear like skin. We could almost be looking at soft flesh rather than hard terracotta. But he reminds us of the purpose of the work by the presence of the flattened halos behind both figures. As with all Donatello’s biblical works, this expressive sculpture first moves our heart and then reminds us of what’s most important: to deepen our faith.
Donatello’s legacy is found in more than his Madonna and Child works. The 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari wrote in his 1568 work “The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects” that Donatello “was not only a very rare sculptor and a marvellous statuary, but also a practised worker in stucco, an able master of perspective, and greatly esteemed as an architect.”
Artists have emulated Donatello’s compositions for centuries. For instance, Berlin’s Bode Museum holds a painted and gilded mid-15th century terracotta replica of his “Madonna of Via Pietrapiana.”
“When the 80-year-old Donatello died on 13 December 1466, he left Florence studded with unmistakable signs of his fertile imagination: monumental figures in marble, bronze, stone, terracotta, wood, and stucco, distributed among façades of churches or palazzo courtyards, looking out onto streets from niches or tabernacles, high up above a piazza or standing over an altar, all marking an urban public space no less than a place of worship, at a time when the boundaries between these two realms were truly blurred and permeable,” wrote Laura Cavazzini and Aldo Galli in an essay in “Donatello: Inventor of the Renaissance,” the book accompanying the 2022 exhibition (of the same name) at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, Germany.
Remnants of Donatello’s Florence can still be seen in the city, and who knows how many more of his unattributed masterpieces may lie hidden in plain sight.
