(jazzy music)
Male: We're on the second floor
of Orsanmichele and here, one after the other,
are all the monumental sculptures
that had once filled the niches outside.
Female: It's important to remember that
Orsanmichele is in many ways the place that
the Renaissance began in Florence.
It began in this space that had both
a secular function as a granary but also
a spiritual function.
Male: It's also a church.
Female: These were sculptures commissioned
by the guilds and so it makes sense
that these first Renaissance sculptures
would be commissioned not by a church,
but by guilds, by these secular organizations.
Male: Okay, so let's take one as an example.
One of the important guilds in the city
were the linen workers.
We're standing in front of St. Mark,
which is this monumental sculpture by Donatello.
We know it's for the linen workers
because he is standing on a pillow
presumably made of linen.
Female: Right. If we think about him outside
in that niche and imagine walking by him,
you could almost imagine this way that you
would relate to him; that you could engage
with him right on the streets of Florence,
this sense of civic pride of bringing beauty to the city.
Male: There really is a sense
of immediacy here.
This is Donatello's brilliance.
Here we have a figure that is, first of all,
reviving the Classical in really important ways.
This is a figure that is an incredible
early expression of contrapposto
that hasn't been seen with this kind
of understanding for 1,000 years.
Female: If we look at so many of the other figures
that were created for Orsanmichele,
they still have that Gothic sway to the hips.
What Donatello give us instead
is something that looks very much
like an ancient Roman sculpture.
Male: Look, for instance, at the hips
that push to his right.
Over the engaged leg, you have the cloth
falling in perfect unbroken lines,
almost as if that's the floating of a Classical column.
It's on the other side that you can see
the knee breaking the cloth.
You can really get a sense, even though it's under
this heavy drapery, you still understand
the movement of the body, the turn of the spine,
the turn of the hips, the axis of the knees.
Female: Donatello's borrowing this directly
from ancient Greek and Roman sculpture.
There's no other place he could have goten this from.
The figure, because of the contrapposto,
really looks alive.
He looks like he can truly walk.
His feet are firmly planted on the ground.
The sense that the weight is shifting
gives the sense that he could walk at any second.
We have an idea of sculpture beginning
to be separate from the architecture,
even though he was in a niche
and he was intended for the architecture.
The contrapposto, the sense of movement,
gives us a sense of his autonomy
from the architecture.
Male: But it's also the authenticity of his experience.
So it's a revival of the Classical,
not only in terms of the mechanics of the body,
but also in terms of the experience of the individual.
You said a moment ago we would walk down
the street and see this figure in a niche.
There would be an immediate kind of relationship.
Yes, that's true, but at the same time
he's seeing further.
He's also seeing past us.
Female: Right. It's this bringing together
of the spiritual and the human so close at this moment
in the early 15th century in Florence.
Male: Look at the face.
There's a kind of intelligence,
there's a kind of internal focus,
there's a kind of awareness
that is just piercing.
He's thinking, he's reflecting
on the Gospels that he holds so easily at his side
and perhaps he's about to speak them to us.
There is this way in which our eyes
are drawn up through the plainer quality
of the drapery to the more focused handling
of the stone near the beard, near his eyes,
look at that furrowed brow,
so that he is somebody that we can understand
and approach in some real way.
Female: You know, the sculptures like
the ones by Ghiberti that are more in that
high Gothic style, the face is often more plain
and less individualized, and our focus
goes on those decorative forms in the drapery.
Male: It's distracted, in a sense.
Female: Exactly, so we don't have that
human to human connection that we're getting here.
Here, instead of focusing on the drapery,
although the drapery is fabulous,
we look directly at the face and we see
the furrowed brow, the eyes that gaze out,
the beard that animates his face
and makes it seem even more thoughtful,
his receding hairline.
Then we look down at his hands
and we can see that Donatello has clearly
been thinking about human anatomy.
Those are not just generalized shapes for hands
but a sense of bone and muscle and veins.
Then down to the feet firmly planted on the ground.
When the Florentines looked up at St. Mark
as they walked, they looked up at him
and saw a figure that ...
Male: It ennobled.
Female: That ennobled them.
They looked at St. Mark and could have a sense
of their own profound dignity as human beings,
as Florentines in the early 15th century.
In a way, St. Mark is a mirror.
Male: Isn't that exactly what this notion
of civic pride that was so tied in to 15th century
Florence was really about?
This notion that we can rise to our own ideals.
Female: We can be like the ancient Romans
and be virtuous and ...
Male: Shake off the corruption of the Medieval
and in a sense return to the greatest
that man had once known.
(jazzy music)