"Bronze David"

Donatello was a master of sculpture in both marble and bronze, one of the greatest of all Italian Renaissance artists. He had a more detailed and wide-ranging knowledge of ancient sculpture than any other artist of his day. His work was inspired by ancient visual examples, which he often daringly transformed.

Donatello invented his own bold new mode of relief in his marble panel St. George Killing the Dragon (1416–17). Known as schiacciato (“flattened out”), the technique involved extremely shallow carving throughout, which created a far more-striking effect of atmospheric space than before. The sculptor no longer modeled his shapes in the usual way but rather seemed to “paint” them with his chisel. Donatello continued to explore the possibilities of the new technique in his marble reliefs of the 1420s and early 1430s.

Donatello had also become a major sculptor in bronze. In the early 1450s Donatello undertook some important works for the Paduan Church of San Antonio: a splendidly expressive bronze crucifix and a new high altar, the most ambitious of its kind, unequaled in 15th-century Europe. Its richly decorated architectural framework of marble and limestone contains seven life-size bronze statues, 21 bronze reliefs of various sizes, and a large limestone relief, Entombment of Christ. The housing was destroyed a century later