Innovation And Diversity

Donatello represented the beginning of a new era of sculpture in the early 15th century.During his long life,he created various works,and the expressive force of his works pointed out the direction for sculptors of later generations.From the early stage,he successfully overcame the unnatural and cerebral quality of Gothic poses and endowed his sculpture with a convincing contemporary artistic feature.He not only created a large number of marble sculpture works,but also made immortal bronze sculpture with exquisite workmanship and created amazing relief works with new expression methods.Although his mature works are different from classical models,his works show a spiritual sense of reality derived from people’s real appearance.Those sculptures made him one of the most important sculptors in the early Italian Renaissance.The reason Donatello held a high position by Cosimo il Vecchio is that he was one of the people who enabled art to experience its rebirth.For centuries,people believed that art had gone through a period of dormancy in the Middle Ages.This concept occupied a dominant position in art history.It was not until artists started art using classical models that they were awakened and had a new life.Vasari has also stressed that his sculptures were more similar to those of ancient Greeks and Romans than the works of other masters.Donatello was pointed out as early as 1481 that he should be regarded as a person as important as a classical sculptor.During Donatello’s 80 years of life,he had created so many impressive works for his art,through which we could see the formation of his character,he innovated technology and its forms in almost all sculptures,and the diversified artistic expressions led the sculpture art of his time.Without Donatello’s early achievements,Michelangelo would have been unthinkable.He definitely has the same artistic height as Michelangelo.He is not only a gifted sculptor,but also one of the outstanding innovative spirits in the Italian Renaissance.