Donatello

by Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy

"Donatello Sculptor is a magisterial, beautifully illustrated study of one of the world's greatest artists. Born in Florence in 1386, in modest circumstances, Donatello rose, through the force of his own genius, to become one of the founding fathers of the Italian Renaissance. When he died in 1466, he was buried at the side of his princely patron, Cosimo il Vecchio de' Medici - a telling measure of the artistic revolution that he had brought about.". "The time for a fresh and authoritative appreciation of Donatello and his work is long overdue. Not since H. W. Janson's massive catalogue of 1957 has there been any comparable attempt to present the full range of Donatello's accomplishment. Donatello Sculptor is, moreover, not just a catalogue of the artist's works, but a fluently written, meticulously researched narrative, based on more than half a century of study by one of the world's outstanding scholars.". "John Pope Hennessy published his first article on Donatello in 1949, and in t