ADVERTISEMENT

You Get What You Pay For

Review: ‘Sculpture in the Age of Donatello’ at the Museum of Biblical Art, New York City through June 14

Donatello, Saint John the Evangelist / Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore / Antonio Quattrone
May 15, 2015

In the art world, as in every walk of life, he who writes the checks calls the shots. All art is a function of what donors and patrons are willing to support, from the Quattrocento Florentine banker who demanded that Fra Filippo Lippi go a little heavier on the ultramarine, to the contemporary Central Park South hedge fund manager who is delighted by the transgressive quality of the work of Ai Weiwei. The requirement for patronage applies just as much to the romantic conception of an artist bucking the expectations of polite society. If said expectation-bucker’s work is one day noticed, it’s at least in part because it eventually found a sympathetic backer.

The same also applies to the institutions that support the arts, and is illustrated by the apparent failure of the Museum of Biblical Art, or MOBIA, in New York City to attract much sympathy at all from the donor class. The Museum will close its doors next month, and reports suggest that a part of the reason is that New York art patrons were made uncomfortable by its religious focus and links to the American Bible Society.

That’s a shame, not least because—as the New York Times observed—it has consistently been a gem of a small museum since opening in 2005. For evidence of this, you should visit the museum’s final exhibition, ‘Sculpture in the Age of Donatello,’ without further delay. (Seriously: the exhibit closes on June 14, which will also be the final day of the museum’s operations.) The phrase ‘once in a lifetime’ gets thrown around a great deal more than it merits, but it very much applies here: Some of the choice pieces from Florence’s Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (which has shut down for renovations) have been shipped across the Atlantic for close inspection at MOBIA. Many of these are huge, heavy, fragile chunks of marble that have never traveled to the United States before and are unlikely to make the journey again. They are also significant and moving artifacts of the history of the early Italian Renaissance: nine sculptures (give or take, given tricky issues of attribution) by Donatello, models done under the supervision of Brunelleschi, and other pieces by Luca della Robbia, Nanni di Banco, and Giovanni d’Ambrogio.

As its name implies, the Italian museum making the loan is devoted to the art of Florence’s Duomo, the grand, central cathedral originally constructed and decorated lavishly with sculptures (the most expensive form of early modern art) by the burghers and guilds of that city between the 13th and 15th centuries. Most of what is on display at MOBIA at some point decorated the exterior of the cathedral, but all such exterior sculptures were later replaced, either by updates that suited later tastes, or by replicas, so that the originals could cease their weather-driven decay.

These pieces date from the very end of the 14th century to the middle of the 15th, as Italian artists and their patrons shifted their stylistic tastes from the Gothic to the Renaissance. Some of these pieces provide a snapshot of the transition as it occurs, like d’Ambrogio’s Annunciation pairing—Mary and the angel stand in formulaic poses popular during the Gothic period, but are decked out with Greco-Roman garb and hair. Mary seems oddly asexual, apparently due to the fact that her face was modeled on that of a Roman statue of a boy.

d'Ambrogio, Virgin
d'Ambrogio, Virgin / Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore / Antonio Quattrone

The rise of Florence’s 15th century embrace of the classical and naturalistic is the most noticeable theme of the exhibit. In the early works of Donatello on display (or what could be early works of Donatello—the attribution is debatable) we have both a small relief of Hercules—not what one would naturally expect for decoration on a cathedral—and also a small relief of Christ as the Man of Sorrow, carved with such hyperrealism that you can count the veins on his miniature forearms.

Donatello, Christ
Donatello, Christ / Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore / Antonio Quattrone

Donatello’s more mature sculptures are the real showstoppers here—another term thrown around too much, but which is again applicable in this case. I was not the only visitor to stop for a long time before St. John the Evangelist, a massive seated figure that, when viewed from the side, turns out only to be nine inches deep at the waist, as it was originally meant to be placed with its back in a niche. Abraham and Isaac, depicting the moment after Abraham hears the angel call out to him to stop, the knife sliding away from his son’s throat, nears the limit of how much tension marble can convey. The Habakkuk, popularly known in Renaissance Florence as the Zuccone, or ‘Squash Head,’ portrays a biblical figure as a Roman statesman—a block of marble so vital that Vasari claimed Donatello would ask it to speak aloud.

Donatello, Saint John the Evangelist
Donatello, Saint John the Evangelist

This is a rich exhibition, arranged with care and attention in a deceptively small space, giving the visitor the opportunity to examine from only a few inches away works that speak to the spirit of Renaissance Florence. That all manner of contemporary nonsense enjoys lavish support, while an institution with the access and taste to mount such a show as this cannot raise the funds to remain open, says all too much about the spirit of our own age.

Published under: Art Reviews