Donatello

Donatello was the greatest sculptor of the early Renaissance and the artist who reintroduced the freestanding nude to European art. Born Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi in Florence around 1386, the son of a wool carder, he trained in Ghiberti's workshop and travelled to Rome with Brunelleschi to study antiquities. His early marble figures for Orsanmichele and the cathedral broke with Gothic convention by giving their subjects psychological presence. The St George of about 1417 stands alert and apprehensive rather than serene, and its base carries a relief of the dragon carved in rilievo schiacciato — flattened relief, sometimes only millimetres deep, in which he used Brunelleschi's perspective to suggest deep space. It is a technique essentially of his own invention. The bronze David, made probably in the 1440s for the Medici, was the first freestanding nude cast since antiquity — a slight adolescent in a shepherd's hat and boots, standing on Goliath's severed head with an ambiguous half-smile. It has been argued over ever since. He worked in Padua from 1443 for a decade, producing the high altar of the Santo and the equestrian monument to the condottiere Gattamelata, the first large bronze equestrian statue since Rome, which established the form for every ruler's monument afterwards. His late work is deliberately harsh. The wooden Mary Magdalene, carved around 1455, shows an emaciated, ragged penitent with broken teeth, and Vasari records that contemporaries found it disturbing. He was uninterested in money, keeping his earnings in a basket hanging from the ceiling for his assistants to take as needed. He died in 1466 and was buried near Cosimo de' Medici.

• Lived: 1386 CE – 1466 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: sculptor