V&A’s Donatello blockbuster brings wonder, beauty and Tuscan sun to South Kensington

Ask the proverbial "people on the street" to name a sculptor from the Italian Renaissance, and even the ones without a trace of interest in art history stand a good chance of coming up with the name Michelangelo. He and his David are so big, they've crossed into pop culture. Go back a century and a half, however, and the answer would have been different. Donatello would have dominated the consciousness back then, just as he had in the four hundred years since his death.

It's not hard to see why Michelangelo connected with the 20th century: rebel, sculptor of muscle-bound figures of power, portrayer of brutal force and raw emotion, immortalised as a restless, troubled genius in modern book and film. But if you want to really touch the spirit of the Renaissance, from its obsession with classical elegance to its love affair with beauty and humanism to the very warmth of its sun-baked piazzas, Donatello is your man. 

The Victoria and Albert Museum's new exhibition, Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance, sets out to prove that point, and does so with style. 

Curators divide their cavernous main space into three sections with arches, walls and loggias, so you find yourself in an abstract distillation of a Tuscan townscape. The first part explores the young Donatello and the workshop system that trained him. There’s work from plenty of names you probably don’t know here, all beautiful, showing the collaborative spirit of the age and the way all the artists influenced each other. We learn about, and see an excellent video on, the jewellery making that was … like many other Renaissance craftsmen… Donatello’s first trade. Many feel that starting at such a fine, intricate scale is what gave the sculptor his virtuosity when he moved to larger scale works, particularly his bronzes. 

The heart of the show is pure Donatello, with free-standing figures, portrait busts, tombs and relief sculptures contributed from museums across Europe. Florence’s Bargello has been particularly generous, but this show started with them and came through Berlin before its triumphal conclusion in London.

The exhibition closes with a look at Donatello’s outsized impact on the art world, particularly in the century after his death and in the huge Renaissance revival of the 19th century. It’s amusing to see the counterfeits in this section created to sate a voracious hunger for the artist. And there are works from as late as the 1920s that exactly copy his style.

While Donatello worked across central Italy, he was indelibly a son of Florence. Any visitor to the cradle of the Renaissance will have seen so much of his work on plinths, walls and in niches, standing amidst so many other wonders of the age, that it’s possible to take it all for granted. The real glory of this show is the way it takes works out of their sensory-flooding contexts and stands them alone, allowing you to fully appreciate just how remarkable they are.

I don’t think anyone in art has been as good at capturing the contradictions of boys on the brink of manhood. Here we’re treated to two Davids, a Saint George and a John the Baptist, all shown as teenagers at that exquisite stage just before their elegant, androgynous features are rewritten by manhood. They exude that curious mix of confidence and doubt, power and fear, one foot in reality and one in some dreamy nether world so distinctive of the age group. The details on St. George’s armour are particularly impressive, reminding us of Donatello the jeweller. So beautiful is the young man in his martial glory we can forgive the fact that the dragon looks as menacing as a golden retriever.

But Donatello isn’t a one trick pony. His women are just as beautiful as his men, shown off by a whole wall of Madonnas and their children. The mothers are ethereal, soft and warm despite the stone they’re made of. The children are plump and adorable. You want to reach out and wiggle a toe or squeeze a fat little thigh. His mastery of children is at its height, however, in a series of spiritelli. (This was a new term for me. Why these frolicking winged children aren’t cherubs or putti is a nuance I can’t explain.) It’s as if someone covered fat, gorgeous babies at peak giggle with a thin coat of bronze to preserve them forever.

He doesn’t just do feel-good art. There are wizened, life-beaten men in a series of portrait busts, a classical form Donatello helped revive. The bronze Christ on loan from the cathedral of Padua is heart-rending in its emaciated pain. An over-sized head of a classical god is as frightening as he is attractive. And yet these, too, are all wondrously beautiful. 

Your jaw is most likely to drop, however, when you look hard at Donatello’s relief sculptures. A relief is a sculpture that rises out of a flat background rather than standing on its own; think of the raised images on a coin. Donatello is credited with inventing a technique called rilievo schiacciato, a kind of squashed relief … the whole thing only a few millimetres deep … where the artist manages to show many layers of depth.

The best example of this is a panel depicting the ascension of Christ, carved from snowy Carrara marble. The exhibition is using this as its lead image in marketing but photography can’t convey its wonder. Christ, Mary and the apostles occupy three different planes. Angels and putti are on at least two more in the background. And then the landscape recedes, in wave after wave of hills, with tiny but perfect town walls barely scratched into the marble. All created from a piece of stone no thicket than your thumb. Elsewhere the receding background is layer upon layer of architecture, while in front a crowd watches St. Francis offer communion to a donkey. (One of his more delightful legends.) That one is in bronze, as is a Crucifixion where crowds, architecture, angels and distinctive Italian umbrella pines draw your eyes ever deeper into the complex scene.

This last relief hangs in the section on Donatello’s legacy, beside copies by followers that are beautiful, but can’t quite compare to the master’s combination of technical perfection and mastery of beauty. That didn’t stop them from following in his footsteps. Much of the look and spirit that defines the Renaissance emerged beneath Donatello’s chisels over more than 60 years of productive work. Everyone that came after studied him, including a young man who would have copied Donatello’s works in the Medici gardens when he started his own training some twenty years after the master’s death. His first work would be a rilievo schiacciato of madonna and child with winged putti occupying various planes of a receding background. Very Donatello. Except the figures are more muscular. More masculine, even though they’re children and a young mother. Michelangelo had arrived. But he wouldn’t have gained his current fame had he not stood on the shoulders of the earlier master.

Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance is on at the Victoria & Albert Museum until 11 June. Reviews have been universally ecstatic, so weekends are likely to sell out. 

It’s good to be king. Especially when you’re collecting Japanese art.

Given the intensity of our cultural sightseeing across the three weeks we spent in Japan in 2019, I didn’t rush to get to The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace for Japan: Courts and Culture. That was a mistake. I imagined the royal family’s stuff couldn’t be that different than what’s on display at top Japanese museums. I was wrong.

It’s not the kinds of objects that differ, but their quality. All the things you’d expect to see in any Japanese exhibition are here: Samurai arms and armour, lacquer boxes and furniture, delicate porcelains, beautiful screens, exquisite prints. Everything was either acquired by a royal for his or her personal collection, or received as a gift from either the government or … more often … the imperial family. In the period between the commercial opening of Japan in 1853 and the beginning of WWII, both countries were empires with an exalted opinion of themselves and each fancied the other their match on the other side of the world. The gift giving was prodigious.

Of course, as any fan of Japanese culture knows, it’s more about elegance and craftsmanship than bling. So what you get here in four tasteful galleries is a subset of art and craft that exemplifies tasteful perfection. It’s all breathtakingly beautiful, one of a kind and manages to pull off that Japanese trick of being both simple and complex.

Britain’s fascination with Japan is an old one. The most striking piece in the first gallery is a set of armour sent as a diplomatic gift by the newly-established Tokugawa shogunate to King James I and VI. It’s hard, in our diverse and variety laden world, to imagine just how alien that beautiful but menacing costume must have been in Renaissance England. Given the age’s love of the exotic, and James’ love of both showing off and of beautiful things, I suspect he adored it. More intriguing, if you can tear your brain away from the sinuously writhing dragons, the spectacular flared helmet and the silk needlework that makes the arm covers look a bit like feathered wings, is the contemplation of what this could have meant. It invited trade. Had the country not changed its mind 20 years later, how might British trade and expansion have changed?

The Tokugawa armour was a false start in international relations, however, and from the 1630s to 1868 the British royals were just like everyone else. They had to buy from Dutch traders, the only Europeans the Japanese let in during their time of isolation. (The Dutch, thought the Japanese, so obviously put money above religion or making social judgments that they didn’t bring the risk of cultural contamination other Europeans threatened.) Seeing the spectacular pieces of porcelain Queen Mary I brought into the collection, you have to wonder if the fact she was Queen of the Netherlands before taking the British throne put her at the head of the shopping queue. 

The most profligate collector, however, is the same spendthrift who usually takes that title in these galleries: good old George IV. Unfortunately, George was splashing the cash when Europeans just couldn’t stop themselves from blinging their oriental collectibles up with French ormolu mounts. They were thought to make the items even more precious. While it’s interesting to see how European craftsmen played off the Japanese foundations, and what they created was masterful, they almost always take away from the allure of the original. 

While purchased collections brought in some wonders, it’s the re-opening of Japan … and the Imperial gift giving that goes with it … that move to jaw dropping territory. 

There’s more armour here, three sets each wonderfully different from the other in their intricate decorative schemes. A set of spears is black lacquer inlaid with chips of mother of pearl; the effect in a procession on a sunny day must have been incredible. Lacquer display cabinets are mind-boggling in the complexity of their creation, but pale to insignificance before a glass bowl created using a cloisonné technique to separate the powdered glass into panels, but then using chemicals to dissolve the wires so you’re left with a translucent, patterned object that seems impossible in its creation. 

There are ceremonial swords aplenty, as beautiful for the patterns and fire in their steel blades as for the ornate hilts, scabbards and presentation boxes. Throughout these objects, however, what is ornate is also generally small and subtle. I regretted deeply not having reading glasses to help me study the fine points. 

Like all the best gifts, many things here combined utility with an outrageous luxury you’d probably not lavish on yourself. The delicate mother of pearl, bamboo and gold fans. The subtly-patterned writing set and lap desk with a variety of bits and pieces that entice you to take up Japanese calligraphy just to learn how to use them. Most intriguing, an “incense game”, packaged in yet another purpose-built lacquer box with customised trays and compartments to hold all the kit. A master of ceremonies lit different bits of incense and challenged players to identify the smell, much as you can do today with sets that help to identify different essences in wine. A variety of small implements for preparing the incense made it clear some expertise was needed to run the game. I was a bit sad to see that the set appears never to have been used, all of the blocks of incense still carefully wrapped in their tidy packaging. 

The curators save the best for last. Just before the exit you’re confronted with two extraordinary screens. Choosing between them, should someone offer you one, would be painful as both are beguilingly beautiful … but in completely different ways. 

The first, a gift for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, is an almost monochrome study in browns.  It’s a scene of mountains, rocks and water, both wild and soothing. There are hints of brownish green in the mountains, and brownish red in the autumnal trees, but the whole scene manages to stay within one colour palette yet be completely realistic. From a distance it’s an almost impressionistic landscape. Up close, you realise tiny houses, crags and trees are all worked in such detail that a few square inches could be cut out and displayed as a precious miniature. It’s so real you feel yourself falling into the landscape, like the children in The Dawn Treader heading back to Narnia through the painting in the guest room. 

The other screen, a coronation gift to Edward VII, uses all the colour not deployed in the mountain scene. Here are birds, trees and flowers in riotous profusion, with one screen for each of the four seasons. Peacocks preen, cranes strut, exotic ducks and pheasants show off plumage unknown in the West, surrounded by billows of peonies, cherry blossom, quince and more. It’s as if the residents of Birdland were let loose at the Chelsea Flower Show. 

Both screens are masterworks of embroidery, so detailed that at a distance you think they’re painted. Up close, you can admire how the use of different threads, materials and techniques creates different visual effects. Usually, by the time you get to the end of an exhibition you’re a bit jaded by the wonders and might walk quickly past the last items. Here, they are worth the price of admission for the whole show.

One of the beauties of The Queen’s Gallery is that you can get your admission ticket validated for use for return visits for the next year, which means you can usually take in two exhibitions on one ticket, with all the return visits you wish. I’m already wondering if I might be able to get back before the show closes. I don’t usually invest in exhibition catalogues but couldn’t resist this one. (It was on sale!) Browsing through reveals a good many items that didn’t even register in my brain, so overwhelmed was I by all the beauty.  

If you want to drink in these wonders of Japan, make it quick, the show closes on 26 February, after which the items will return to their usual places throughout the Royal palaces. 

For more stories on Japan, please see the index “The Joys of Japan” in the right column of this blog. It lists all of my coverage from our trip in 2019, with links. Note the 3-column layout doesn’t come up if you’re viewing on a mobile device.