Making Up Materials: Donatello and the Cosmetic Act

Abstract

Throughout his career, Donatello (1383/6–1464) produced sculptures with surfaces that simulated a more precious material than the one underneath. Typically motivated by an ambition to reproduce ancient feats, Donatello’s surface cunning provoked admiration as well as unease. By reading these sculptures alongside other practices aimed at altering the appearance, but not the essence, of something, and examining the preoccupations these “cosmetic acts” reveal in a culture where the lure and distrust of surface appearances were intertwined, we can see Donatello in a new light—as a cosmetic provocateur.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Dedicated to John Paoletti.

I presented portions of this essay at the Materiality of Artists’ Colors conference at The Pennsylvania State University (2018) and at the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting (Toronto, 2019); and as longer-format lectures at Harvard University (2016), Princeton University (2018), The Pennsylvania State University (2019), and the University of Georgia (2022). I thank Rachel Boyd, Noah Dasinger, Una d’Elia, Liliane Erhart, Christina Neilson, and Shelley Zuraw for their engagement with this work, and the audiences at these events for their questions and comments. My heartfelt thanks to Roland Betancourt, Chris Brown, Frank Fehrenbach, Joseph Koerner, Cassie Mansfield, Alina Payne, and Sarah Rich for engaging with drafts at various stages. I am particularly grateful to Christy Anderson, Nick Geller, and the two anonymous reviewers at The Art Bulletin for suggestions that helped me to refine the style and substance of the text. On a more pragmatic level, Giovanna Baldassin Molli granted me unrestricted access to the High Altar at the Santo in Padua in 2019 at a critical moment in my research. Although the kernel of this article was first proposed in my 2017 dissertation, much of the text that appears here was written in 2019 with the support of a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art from the Getty Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies. Subsequent grants from the American Philosophical Society (2020), the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation (2020), and the Renaissance Society of America (2022), as well as research support through the Carey Memorial Early Career Professorship at The Pennsylvania State University (2021–24) enabled me to finalize my research and writing. All errors are my own, as are all translations, unless otherwise indicated.

Epigraph. “Donatello tigneva e suoi fattori perché e non piacessino agli altri,” cited in Angelo Polizianos Tagebuch (1477–79), ed. Albert Wesselski (Jena: Diederichs, 1929), 168 (no. 322).

1 The surfaces of Donatello’s sculptures—and not just those with dissimulated materials—have only recently begun to garner serious art-historical attention. Informed by a number of substantial publications arising from cleaning and conservation campaigns in the 2000s, scholars like Amy R. Bloch, Una Roman d’Elia, Jim Harris, and Alison Wright have helped lead the way. See Bloch, “Sculpture, Donatello, and the Goldsmith’s Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” Art Bulletin 104, no. 1 (March 2022): 48–77; d’Elia, “How the Quattrocento Saw Ancient Sculpture in Color,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 35, no. 3 (Spring 2016): 216–26; Harris, “Donatello’s Polychromed Sculpture: Case Studies in Materials and Meaning” (PhD diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, 2010); and Wright, “The Politics of the Gilded Body in Early Florentine Statuary,” Sculpture Journal 29, no. 2 (2020): 131–58. These analyses have done an excellent job of articulating the thought and experimental vigor that Donatello and his fellow fifteenth-century sculptors put into transforming their works’ surfaces; and of accounting for how intrinsic such transformations were in shaping perception and meaning. Yet because these studies have tended to focus on particular material specializations (leading to separate accounts of polychromy, gilt metal, etc.), they have been less attuned to certain guiding principles that Donatello’s dissimulated materials share. They have also been less concerned with understanding how he and his peers understood disguised surfaces in general. Additional scholarship on Donatello’s treatment of surface, less synthetic in nature but important nevertheless, is cited elsewhere in this essay, as is the conservation-related literature.

2 In the discipline more broadly, there has been recent interest in the aesthetic and conceptual resources of surface in sculpture and the decorative arts, as well as a small but vital literature devoted to decorative objects that imitate a different material than the one(s) from which they are made. See, e.g., Jonathan Hay, Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (London: Reaktion Books, 2010); Marta Ajmar, “The Renaissance in Material Culture: Material Mimesis as Force and Evidence of Globalization,” in The Routledge Handbook of Globalization and Archaeology, ed. Tamar Hodos (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 669–86; and The Matter of Mimesis: Studies of Mimesis and Materials in Nature, Art and Science, ed. Marjolijn Bol and E. C. Spary, Studies in Art and Materiality 9 (Leiden: Brill, 2023).

3 “E fu mai dipintore, che sul nero, o del nero facesse bianco, se non costoro? È nascerà molte volte una fanciulla, e forse le piú, che paiano scrafaggi; strofina di qua, ingessa di là, mettila al sole, e’ fannole diventare piú bianche che ‘l cecero,” cited in Franco Sacchetti, Il trecentonovelle, ed. Emilio Faccioli (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), 357 (CXXXVI); “li diavoli fanno parere e diventare angioli di bellezza,” cited in ibid., 359 (CXXXVII). Scholarship on the interfaces between cosmetics and art has mostly centered on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Discussions involving fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy are rarer, but see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “‘Statua depicta, facies ficta’: Il colore delle statue e il belletto delle donne,” in Niveo de marmore: L’uso artistico del marmo di Carrara dall’XI al XV secolo, ed. Enrico Castelnuovo (Genoa: Colombo, 1992), 21–26; Robert Brennan, Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy (London: Harvey Miller, 2019), 93–180; and Wolf-Dietrich Löhr, “Korrekturen: Schöpfung und Schminke bei Franco Sacchetti,” in Parlare dell’arte nel Trecento: Kunstgeschichten und Kunstgespräch im 14. Jahrhundert in Italien, ed. Gerhard Wolf (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 103–19.

4 Bartolomeo Fazio (ca. 1457), cited in Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 109, 168.

5 See epigraph. Although dating to Donatello’s lifetime, this saying comes to us through an anthology of popular Florentine anecdotes and witticisms assembled shortly after the sculptor’s death in 1466. Art historians have mostly treated the saying as playful quipping about the sculptor’s sexual identity, real or imagined. See, e.g., H. W. Janson, The Sculpture of Donatello (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 85; and for a more nuanced view, Adrian W. B. Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), esp. 165–68, 317–18. There is a parallel in the saying with the practice of painting actors in festival performances and sacred plays, where local youths sometimes appeared as angels and devils, the latter painted black to signify they had been scorched by hell’s fire. Such connotations, if applicable, would only enhance the saying’s sodomitical subtext. At the same time, the inversion of Donatello’s artistic habits—his strategic use of makeup skills to render his shop hands artificially ugly—highlights his cunning.

6 This is different than suggesting that Donatello’s feigned materials were “about” or “the same as” cosmetics, even if empirical similarities do exist (e.g., both practices used lead white pigment, resin, linseed oil, and mercury as a foundation; sculptural surfaces were occasionally called “skins” in popular jargon and in the technical vocabulary of artisans; makeup recipes appear beside those for gilding, varnishing, or waterproofing materials). A document on the Fonte Gaia from 1420 refers to “difetti di peli.” See James Beck, Jacopo della Quercia, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), vol. 2, 394. The use of “peli” also extended to architecture. See Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 232.

7 “E qual artista, o di panni, o di lana, o dipintore è, che del nero possa far bianco? Certo niuno; però che è contro natura,” cited in Sacchetti, Il trecentonovelle, 357 (CXXXVI). Comparisons between female cosmetic routines and artistic practices may also be found in Boccaccio’s Corbaccio (ca. 1355) and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, the latter translated into the vernacular as Arte dell’Amare and widely available throughout the fifteenth century.

8 For a contemporary sermon on cosmetics, with characteristic remarks, see Bernardino of Siena, “On the Vanity of the World and Especially of Women,” University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization, ed. Eric Cochrane and Julius Kirshner, 8 vols. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), vol. 5, 121; and in an artistic context, Cennino Cennini, Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’arte: A New English Translation and Commentary with Italian Transcription, ed. and trans. Lara Broecke (London: Archetype, 2015), 249.

9 The membership records of the Compagnia are transcribed in Luigi Manzoni, Statuti e matricole dell’arte dei pittori delle città di Firenze, Perugia e Siena (Rome: Ermanno Loescher, 1904), here 126. Cathedral payment records occasionally refer to Donatello as goldsmith and stone carver in the same entry. See, e.g., Il Duomo di Firenze: Documenti sulla decorazione della chiesa e del campanile tratti dall archivio dell’opera, ed. Giovanni Poggi (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1909), 50 (doc. 280), 257 (doc. 1286).

10 The most complete analysis of the Compagnia and its relationship to Donatello’s Joshua is Cheryl Korte, “Polychromed Quattrocento Sculpture in Florence” (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2011), esp. 9–64, 132–62.

11 Alessandro Conti attributed the polychromy on the Crucifix to Bicci di Lorenzo, a view subsequently endorsed by many scholars. See Conti, “Frammenti pittorici in Santa,” Paragone arte 19, no. 225 (1968): 10–20.

12 For the Joshua’s account-book entries, see Il Duomo di Firenze, 75–84 (docs. 414–21, 435). On the statue’s history, see most fundamentally Charles Seymour Jr., Michelangelo’s David: A Search for Identity (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), 33–34.

13 Il Duomo di Firenze, 77 (doc. 417).

14 Ibid., 76 (doc. 413).

15 Ibid., 77 (doc. 417).

16 Ibid., 76 (doc. 415).

17 Pliny the Elder, Natural History: Books 33–35, trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 156–57 (34.39). The idea of the “audacious” colossus in marble or bronze was recapitulated later in Donatello’s lifetime by Alberti, Ghiberti, and others.

18 On fifteenth-century definitions of the colossus’s height, typically defined as three times life-size, see Virginia Bush, The Colossal Sculpture of the Cinquecento (New York: Garland, 1976), xxvi.

19 See Il Duomo di Firenze, 77 (doc. 417).

20 Most often, and to a large extent because of its cosmetic aspects, art historians have cast the Joshua as a faltering first step in the march to Michelangelo’s David. For this teleological approach, see, e.g., A. Victor Coonin, From Marble to Flesh: The Biography of Michelangelo’s David (Florence: Florentine Press, 2014), 29–30.

21 In a given day, any Florentine navigating the marketplace, Cathedral square, workshops, or other heavily trafficked spaces would have heard if not precisely the stories that survive for posterity, then certainly material from the same popular repertoire. On the importance of these novelle to fifteenth-century Florentines, see Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), esp. 41–67; and Shayne Aaron Legassie, “The Lies of the Painters: Artisan Trickery and the Labor of Painting in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 487–519. On popular storytelling practices, including the amateur performers who recited stories publicly, see, e.g., Niall Atkinson, “Architecture, Anxiety, and the Fluid Topographies of Renaissance Florence” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2009), 403–544.

22 On the Decameron’s popularity in fifteenth-century Florence, see Christian Bec, “Sur la lecture de Boccace à Florence au Quattrocento,” Studi sul Boccaccio 9 (1975–76): 247–60. On oral performances of the Comedy, see John Ahern, “Singing the Book: Orality in the Reception of Dante’s Comedy,” in Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Amilcare Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 214–39.

23 Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decameron (Florence: Passigli, Borghi e Compagni, 1831), 294 (VIII.9).

24 See Boccaccio, Decameron, 272 (VIII.6). The joke is doubly malicious, since dog-ginger was bitter and aloe a laxative.

25 For gilded stone, see Giovanni Sercambi, Novelle, ed. Alessandro D’Ancona (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1871), 156–63; gilded copper coins, Sercambi, Novelle inedite di Giovanni Sercambi: Tratte dal Codice trivulziano CXCIII, ed. Rodolfo Renier (Turin: Loescher, 1889), 211; and ochre with orpiment, Sercambi, Novelle, 163.

26 See, e.g., Leon Battista Alberti, De statua, ed. Marco Collareta (Livorno: Sillabe, 1998).

27 The observation is commonplace, but see Dennis Romano, Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy, c. 1100 to c. 1400 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 182–85.

28 On Donatello’s early formation under Ghiberti and familiarity with clay, see Francesco Caglioti, Laura Cavazzini, Aldo Galli, and Neville Rowley, “Reconsidering the Young Donatello,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 57 (2015): 15–45.

29 “uno modello di mattoni, murato a chalcina,” cited in La cupola di Santa Maria del Fiore, ed. Cesare Guasti (Florence: Barbèra, Bianchi e Comp., 1857), 25–26 (doc. 43). On the role of brick in Brunelleschi’s cupola, see Eugenio Battisti, Filippo Brunelleschi (London: Phaidon, 2012), 124–56.

30 This method differed from those for large-scale terracotta sculpture of the era. See Bruce Boucher, “Italian Renaissance Terracotta: Artistic Revival or Technological Innovation?” in Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova, ed. Boucher (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 11–14. On transmediality in the Joshua, see Daniel M. Zolli, “Donatello’s Promiscuous Technique” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2017), 46–56; and in slightly different terms, Bloch, “Sculpture,” 68–69.

31 I derive my translation, with slight alterations, from Brennan, Painting as a Modern Art, 95.

32 “Deliberaverunt quod Donatus Niccolai Bartoli pictor habere debeat pro pretio sui laboris in faciendo figuram Josue . . . pro eius labore et magisterio et expensis per eum factis, in totum f. CXXVIII au.,” cited in Il Duomo di Firenze, 77 (doc. 420; emphasis added).

33 For the claim that “pictor” was mistaken, see James H. Beck, “Masaccio’s Early Career as a Sculptor,” Art Bulletin 53, no. 2 (June 1971): 177–95, here 179. More often, the observation is implicit in the form of “sic” added to transcriptions of the document (as in Il Duomo di Firenze, 77 [doc. 420]).

34 On the Annunciation putti, see Maria Grazia Vaccari, “The Cavalcanti Annunciation,” trans. Elisa Sani, Sculpture Journal 9, no. 1 (2003): 19–37; and Harris, “Donatello’s Polychromed Sculpture,” 48–96.

35 “singulare et precipuo maestro di fare figure di bronzo e di legno e di terra e poi cuocerle, e avendo fatto quello huomo grande,” cited in Giovanni Chellini, Le ricordanze, ed. Maria Teresa Sillano (Milan: Angeli, 1984), 218.

36 Antonio Manetti, Novella del grasso legnaiuolo, ed. Domenico Moreni (Florence: Magheri, 1820).

37 The connection is common, but see, e.g., Atkinson, “Architecture,” 506.

38 Lead white came from a black metal (lead) and returned to this earlier chromatic state. See Cennini, Il Libro, 85, n5.

39 For these campaigns, see Il Duomo di Firenze, 77 (docs. 417–21), 80 (docs. 435–36).

40 I derive this translation, with minor changes, from Douglas Biow, The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 61, 201n16. Ivory was frequently polychromed in a manner similar to my discussion of marble below. See Christine Kowalski, “Polychromy on Medieval Ivories from the LVR Landes Museum, Bonn,” Sculpture Journal 23, no. 1 (2014): 95–98.

41 I adapt this point from Carla Freccero, “Economy, Woman, and Renaissance Discourse,” in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 205. For a different perspective, see Klapisch-Zuber, “‘Statua depicta’,” 21–26. Beyond suggesting that cosmetics were physically corrosive and deleterious to women’s beauty, and so value, Alberti’s dialogue characterizes makeup—added to an ivory statue or a woman’s skin—as needless expenditure. A spin on this idea may be found in Cecco Angiolieri, Le rime, ed. Antonio Lanza (Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi, 1990), 245–47.

42 “oggi guasto dal tempo,” cited in Francesco Bocchi and Giovanni Cinelli, Le bellezze della città di Firenze (Florence: Gio. Gugliantini, 1677), 44.

43 Il Duomo di Firenze, 77–78 (doc. 423). Although Brunelleschi appears in the initial payment, he evidently left the project quickly.

44 On the relationship of this work’s techniques to goldsmiths and architects, with additional bibliography, see Bloch, “Sculpture,” 69.

45 See Marco Collareta, “Metalwork and Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Art,” in The Springtime of the Renaissance: Sculpture and the Arts in Florence, 1400–60, ed. Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi and Marc Bormand, exh. cat. (Florence: Mandragora, 2013), 98–99.

46 Cited in Il Duomo di Firenze, 58 (doc. 329).

47 See, e.g., John Pope-Hennessy, Donatello: Sculptor (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993), 47–48; and Coonin, From Marble to Flesh, 30.

48 See, e.g., d’Elia, “How the Quattrocento Saw Ancient Sculpture.”

49 Such treatments are visible to the naked eye and are substantiated (in the case of polychromy) by payments to Donatello for “painting [to be applied] on marble.” See Il Duomo di Firenze, 33 (doc. 199). For comparable treatments in Donatello’s Saint Mark for Orsanmichele, see Anna Maria Giusti, “Due interventi su marmi donatelliani: il San Marco e il Sepolcro di Baldassarre Cossa,” in Donatello-Studien, ed. Monika Cämmerer (Munich: Bruckmann, 1989), 113–20; and Anna Maria Giusti, Carlo Biliotti, and Cristina Samarelli, “Alcuni casi di utilizzo del laser nella pulitura dei marmi,” OPD Restauro 8 (1996): 120–26.

50 Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, ed. Girolamo Mancini (Florence: Carnesecchi, 1908), 209–10.

51 “ciascun fallea,” “e per che via s’invia / chi si disvia da Ipocrate,” cited in Franco Sacchetti, Il libro delle rime, ed. Franca Brambilla Ageno (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1990), 399–400 (CCXLVIII).

52 The idea gained etymological authority when the seventh-century theologian Isidore of Seville, still widely referenced in the Quattrocento, traced the word “hypocrita” to Greek play-actors “who [concealed] themselves with pigments [in order to] deceive the public.” The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 220 (X.G.113–I.126).

53 Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ed. Giovanni Castrogiovanni (Palermo: Lo Bianco, 1858), 112 (Inferno 23.58–59).

54 “E questo hae a significare, che gl’ipocriti nell’apparenza, e di sopra paiono d'oro, cioè buoni e santi, e dentro sono altro,” cited in L’ottimo commento della Divina Commedia, ed. Alessandro Torri (Pisa: N. Capurro, 1827–29), 395. Compare this to the poet’s portrayal of the Faithful in Paradise, who don bone and leather—simple materials presented truthfully—and whose faces are “unpainted [because they are] content with uncovered skin” (“sanza ‘l viso dipinto . . . esser contenti a le pelle scoperta”). See Dante, La Divina Commedia, 380 (Paradiso 15.112–17).

55 “Niuno ochulto ho no’ mànifesto amicho à l’omo, sì grande nè sì carissimo, quanto la chiara fama: la quale chi l’à, no’ può essere se no’ buono, giusto e diritto,” cited in Gino Corti, “Consigli sulla mercatura di un anonimo trecentista,” Archivio Storico Italiano 110 (1952): 114–19, here 118.

56 Karl Elben, Zur Lehre von der Waarenfälschung (Freiburg: Mohr, 1881), 21.

57 The locus classicus for the Louis’s technique is Bruno Bearzi, “La tecnica fusoria di Donatello,” in Donatello e il suo tempo (Florence: Istituto nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento, 1968), 97–105; but see also Brunella Teodori and Ludovica Nicolai, “Donatello, San Ludovico di Tolosa, 1422–25,” Kermes: La rivista del restauro 87 (July–September 2012): 7–17.

58 The tendency is widespread, but see John Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 28.

59 On the etymology of Rucellai, see Un mercante fiorentino e la sua famiglia nel secolo XV, ed. Giuseppe Marcotti (Florence: G. Barberà, 1881), 53–54. On the della Robbia surname and its relationship to the madder plant (rubia), see John Pope-Hennessy, Luca della Robbia (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), 11.

60 On the counterfeiting of dyes, see Romano, Markets and Marketplaces, 164. For period statutes prohibiting such dyes, see, e.g., Statuto dell’arte della lana di Firenze (1317–1319), ed. Anna Maria Agnoletti (Florence: Le Monnier, 1940), esp. 25, 105.

61 Barney et al., Etymologies of Isidore, 355 (XVII.ix.98).

62 For the first saying, a commonplace mnemonic, see Sacchetti, Il trecentonovelle, 385 (CXLIV). For the second, see Angelo Polizianos Tagebuch, 20 (no. 30). In a different vein, artisanal deception featured in penitential handbooks aimed at preparing clergymen to take confessions, encouraging them to ask artisans whether they “practiced their craft or [made] work sinfully” (“se feceo arte o uero opera con laquale si pechi”), by “making cosmetics for women” (“fare del liscio per le donne”), for example, or “selling counterfeit gold [or] gold that is less pure” (“se uēde loro archimiato . . . o oro men puro”). See Saint Antoninus, Confessionale: Defecerunt vulghare (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Guicciardini 3.3.5.1), r3r, r4v. On fifteenth-century Florentine penitential handbooks, see Aden Kumler, “Periculum and Peritia in the Late Medieval ‘Ars Market’,” Codex Aquilarensis 35 (2019): 157–78, here 161–67.

63 The literature on marketplace fraud is vast, but see, e.g., Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), esp. 68–76.

64 On wool seals, see, e.g., Alfred Doren, Die Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie vom 14. Biz zum 16. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur geschichte des modernen Kapitalismus (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1901), 337.

65 The classic discussion of this topic, though confined to painting, is Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. 11–27. The Por Santa Maria statutes distinguished between no less than seven red dyes. See Statuti dell’arte di Por Santa Maria del tempo della repubblica, ed. Umberto Dorini (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1934), 128–29, 537–38, 551, esp. 489–90. For gold, see Bloch, “Sculpture.”

66 On the “period eye,” see Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 29–108.

67 “stando poi . . . con li occhi più aperti,” Cited in Sercambi, Novelle inedite, 213.

68 See, e.g., Statuti dell’arte di Por Santa Maria, 498–99, specifying that artisans found with unregulated dyes in their workshop would be expelled from the profession and forced to wear an oversized miter (a fool’s cap) in public.

69 Cited in ibid., 233, 235.

70 “oviare alle malizie, frodi e inghanni che si chomettono e chommetere si possono per tutti quelli che nella città di Firenze,” cited in ibid., 470. Por Santa Maria restricted appointments of “cercatori e uficiali sopra gl’inghanni” (literally, “searchers and officials regulating deceits”) to card-carrying guild members who were master goldsmiths and “mature men of good conscience” (ibid., 470–71).

71 The statute mentions substandard alloys explicitly but tasks the officials with identifying and punishing anyone working, or planning to sell, gold or silver in any manner not conforming to guild rules.

72 The matter of who cast and fire-gilded the Louis has been a powerful stimulant to debate, though consensus has formed around Michelozzo. For representative remarks, see Harriet McNeal Caplow, “Michelozzo: His Life, Sculpture and Workshops” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1970), 389–91. Teodori and Nicolai, “Donatello,” raise the intriguing possibility that Donatello undertook this work himself, while also allowing that the sculptor outsourced casting activities to specialists throughout his career.

73 Michelozzo likely assisted Ghiberti on his first set of doors for the Baptistery (ca. 1420–24) and on the Saint Matthew at Orsanmichele (1421–23). On Michelozzo’s background as goldsmith and die-engraver, see Caplow, “Michelozzo,” 56–91.

74 Statuti dell’arte di Por Santa Maria, 413.

75 On Michelozzo’s die and its accompanying coin, see Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, ed., Monete fiorentine dalla Repubblica ai Medici (Florence: Museo Nazionale del Bargello, 1984), 38–39 (no. 49); and Giuseppe Toderi and Fiorenza Vannel, Monete italiane del Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Firenze: Repubblica, 3 vols. (Florence: Polistampa, 2005), vol. 2, 74.

76 For approximate costs of Ghiberti’s John and Matthew, see Alfred Doren, Das Aktenbuch für Ghibertis Matthäus-Statue an Or San Michele zu Florenz (Berlin: Cassirer, 1906), 31–32. The surviving documentation for the Louis, though fragmentary, leaves little doubt about its high costs. See Diane Finiello Zervas, The Parte Guelfa, Brunelleschi & Donatello, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti 8 (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1988), 366–68.

77 All of Ghiberti’s statues for Orsanmichele restrict gilding to, e.g., the borders of drapery, sandals, or lettering.

78 Bloch, “Sculpture,” 270–71. Bloch also explores the Louis in relation to the guild’s concern with counterfeit gems and how Donatello navigated guild laws in the San Rossore (ca. 1422–27) and gilded candle-bearers (1436–38).

79 The differences are clear when one compares the Louis’s crozier with an exactly contemporary gilt-metal crozier produced for the Florentine Archbishop Amerigo Corsini (ca. 1420–25; Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence), every segment of which reveals the metal beneath. See Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré dal Poggetto, ed., L’oreficeria nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Florence: S. P. E. S., 1977), 245–46 (cat. no. 122).

80 On the overspill of gilding, see Wright, “Politics of the Gilded Body,” 149. On the gilding generally, see Laura Goldenbaum, In testimonium veritatis: Der Bronzegisant als Totenabbild im italienischen Quattrocento (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2018), 153–78. On the restoration of the tomb in 1986, including a discussion of the gilding and bronze on the effigy, see Loretta Dolcini, Mauro Matteini, and Arcangelo Moles, “Sepolcro di Baldassarre Cossa [scheda di restauro],” OPD Restauro 3 (1988): 121–24; and Giusti, “Due interventi su marmi donatelliani.”

81 The earliest references to either sculpture’s materials, datable in both cases to the decade after Donatello’s death, refer explicitly to bronze. See Janson, Sculpture of Donatello, 47, 60.

82 “Noi abbiamo tolto a contender col muro,” cited in Sacchetti, Il trecentonovelle, 360 (CXXXVII).

83 See Atkinson, “Architecture,” 96–108.

84 See, respectively, Ronald Rainey, “Sumptuary Legislation in Renaissance Florence” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1985), esp. 429–91; Stephen J. Milner, “‘Fanno bandire, notificare, et expressamente comandare’: Town Criers and the Information Economy of Renaissance Florence,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16, no. 1–2 (Fall 2013): 107–51, esp. 128, 148–49; and Carlo Fiorilli, “I dipintori a Firenze nell’arte dei Medici e Speziali e Merciai,” Archivio storico italiano 78 (1920): 57.

85 See Christina Neilson, Practice and Theory in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Verrocchio and the Epistemology of Making Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 122–23.

86 Cited in Luca Gatti, “The Art of Freedom: Meaning, Civic Identity and Devotion in Early Renaissance Florence” (PhD diss., University of London, 1992), 236.

87 See, e.g., Ronald Lightbown, Donatello and Michelozzo: An Artistic Partnership and Its Patrons in the Early Renaissance, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), vol. 1, 244–45.

88 Cited in in Cesare Guasti, Il pergamo di Donatello pel Duomo di Prato (Florence: Ricci, 1887), 26 (doc. 17).

89 On the fifteenth-century earthenware at Prato cathedral, see Gabriella Poggesi and Anna Wentkowska, eds., La ricerca archeologica nell’area del Palazzo Vescovile di Prato (Florence: Polistampa, 2008), esp. 126–61. On Donatello’s use of shell gold, see Anna Maria Giusti, ed., Donatello restaurato: I marmi del pulpito di Prato (Prato: Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, 2000), esp. 43–45, 68–72, 93–100, 140–43.

90 As it had the fourteenth-century artisans who embedded Islamic earthenware bowls, or bacini, into church facades in nearby Pisa to evoke the chromatic sheen of marble and mosaic inlay. On bacini, see Rosamond Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 2–3, 95.

91 Ingeniously, the chromatic range of the tesserae (ochre, olive, brown, and blue-white maiolica), which would have shone through the golden film, simulates the optical effects of reflected light; they appear to glint. On Donatello’s sensitivity to light’s interaction with his art, see, e.g., Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, “La storia sulla pelle: Qualche riflessione sul restauro del David di Donatello,” in Donatello: Il David restaurato, ed. Paolozzi Strozzi (Florence: Giunti, 2008), 94; and Daniel M. Zolli, “Donatello’s Visions: The Sculptor at Florence Cathedral,” in Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral, ed. Timothy Verdon and Zolli, exh. cat. (London: GILES; New York: Museum of Biblical Art, 2015), 70–72.

92 On efforts to lure glassmakers to Florence Cathedral from northern Germany in 1434–36, see Il Duomo di Firenze, 147–53 (docs. 777–83).

93 That mosaic could be readily purchased throughout Tuscany may be inferred from documents (see, e.g., Richard Krautheimer and Trude Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982], 366 [doc. 5]). Cennini included no less than four alternatives for glass or glass paste mosaic in his Libro dell’arte, a possible indication that Donatello’s choice of media was not entirely unusual. See Cennini, Il Libro, 230–32, for “mosaic of quill,” “paper,” and two recipes for “mosaic of crushed eggshells.”

94 Even if some viewers simply did not know this “golden mosaic” was feigned (as seems probable), this would not have inhibited their appreciation of the pulpit’s symbolism and artistic quality. The technique is, after all, as pragmatic as it is conceptually rich.

95 “quem constat tanta magnificentia et arte constructum ut preclaris illis Romane antiquitatis operibus partim inferior iudicetur . . . ut non magis de sumptu quam de artis ingenio amireris,” cited in Ulrich Pfisterer, Donatello und die Entdeckung der Stile, 1430–1445 (Munich: Hirmer, 2002), 493 (doc. 16).

96 No material analysis of the Tabernacle mosaic exists, though see Gabriele Morolli, “‘Sacella’: I Tempietti Marmorei di Piero de’ Medici: Michelozzo o Alberti,” in Michelozzo Scultore e Architetto (1396–1472), ed. Morolli (Florence: Centro Di, 1998), 157.

97 On the Madonna dei Cordai, see Francesca Kumar and Carlo Sisi, “Un rilievo in stucco del Museo Bardini: La tecnica e il restauro,” OPD Restauro 1 (1986): 10–17.

98 Joachim Poeschke, Donatello and His World: Sculpture of the Italian Renaissance, trans. Russell Stockman (New York: Abrams, 1993), esp. 34–35.

99 Volker Herzner, “Regesti donatalliani,” Rivista dell’Istituto nazionale d’archeologia e storia dell’arte, 3rd ser., 2 (1979): 205 (doc. 196).

100 See d’Elia, “How the Quattrocento Saw Ancient Sculpture,” 218.

101 I derive this translation, with slight modifications, from Janson, Sculpture of Donatello, 132.

102 Ibid. 139–40.

103 The idea is common, though see Peter Burke, Tradition and Innovation in Renaissance Italy (London: Fontana, 1974), 159.

104 For the Entombment’s payment records, see Antonio Sartori, “Documenti riguardanti Donatello e il suo altare di Padova,” Il Santo 1 (1961): 37–99, here 77 –78, 84.

105 Owing to a U-shaped choir screen, the Entombment was visible through a metal grille to laity, but only physically accessible to Santo affiliates.

106 Although the Paduan conservators have yet to publish their findings, Jim Harris has summarized them in detail. Harris was also the first to propose the Entombment’s connection to porphyry. See Harris, “Donatello’s Polychromed Sculpture,” 230–41, 248–61. While I am inclined to this reading, it is possible that Donatello imitated bronze, in keeping with the rest of the Santo ensemble, and not porphyry.

107 On this point, see, e.g., Suzanne B. Butters, The Triumph of Vulcan: Sculptors’ Tools, Porphyry, and the Prince in Ducal Florence, 2 vols. (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1996), vol. 1, 48–52.

108 Ibid., 1:143.

109 In the years of Donatello’s Paduan sojourn, his acquaintance Alberti allegedly tried unsuccessfully to fortify tools enough to make porphyry yield. See ibid., 1:143.

110 On this legend, see ibid., 1:174–78. The fact that the stonemasons’ and sculptors’ guild (both in Florence and Padua) required their members to observe the feast day of the Quattro Coronati, its patron saints, makes it likely that Donatello and his fellow sculptors knew the story.

111 See, e.g., Janson, Sculpture of Donatello, 170.

112 Nor was such dialectical thinking out of place. In the functional context of the altar, the Entombment offered an appropriate symbolic gloss on Christ’s martyrdom; yet its insistent artifice distinguished it from the real body and blood of Christ, the Eucharist, which was above human art.

113 “est scurpire figuras [eneas] et est summus Artifex in predictis,” cited in Pfisterer, Donatello, 490 (doc. 8).

114 “E se ce la menassi con voi, bisognerebbe metterci le brache di ferro e tignerle il volto di carbone, come faceva Donatello al suo fattore,” cited in Karl Frey, ed., Der Literarische Nachlass Giorgio Vasaris, 2 vols. (Munich: Müller, 1923–30), vol. 1, 194.

115 On the revival of mosaic, see Werner Haftmann, “Ein Mosaik der Ghirlandaio Werkstatt aus dem Bersitz des Lorenzo Magnifico,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 7 (1940): 97–107. On cameo-carving, see Laurie Fusco and Gino Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici: Collector and Antiquarian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. 112–35.

116 “Per la qual cosa, la natura giustamente sdegnata, per vedersi quasi beffare da le strane figure che costoro lasciavano al mondo, deliberò far nascere chi, operando, riducesse ad ottima forma, con buona grazia e proporzione, i male arrivati bronzi et i poveri marmi da lei come da madre benigna . . . . Laonde, per meglio adempire la volontà e la deliberazione sua, colmò Donato nel nascere di maravigliose doti, et in persona quasi di se medesima lo mandò qua giù tra’ mortali, pieno di benignità, di giudizio e di amore,” cited in Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ piú eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri, ed. Luciano Bellosi and Aldo Rossi, 2 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), vol. 1, 310. Vasari employed this originary myth only in the first edition of 1550, opting for a more restrained beginning in the 1568 edition.

117 See Patricia Lee Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 326.

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Daniel M. Zolli

Daniel M. Zolli is the Agnes Scollins Carey Memorial Early Career Professor in the Arts and assistant professor of art history at The Pennsylvania State University. He is currently completing a monograph on theories and practices of material experimentation in Donatello’s workshops, on which this article is based [Department of Art History, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, [email protected]].