(piano music playing)
Beth: We're standing in the square,
outside of the Church of Sant Antonio in Padua,
looking across a traffic circle,
at Donatello's great equestrian monument,
from the mid-15th century, Gattamelata.
Steven: Donatello had spent a good deal of time
in Rome, was up in Padua for about 10 years,
and worked on a number of important commissions,
but, this is clearly his most famous.
Beth: And, it's important to note that Donatello
was twice in Rome, because he got to see
the great equestrian sculpture of Marcus Aurelius.
Steven: This is really important,
and I think it's a little bit difficult
for us to understand how extraordinary
that ancient sculpture must have seemed.
You know, by the late medieval
and the beginning of the Renaissance,
when Donatello was alive,
you had a culture that had forgotten
how to cast bronze at a large scale.
In other words, they could look at a sculpture
from antiquity that they couldn't make any more.
Beth: That certainly seemed like a challenge,
and Donatello took up that challenge.
Can we, a 1,000 years later, make a monumental
bronze sculpture, an equestrian sculpture?
Steven: Well, an equestrian sculpture
is especially difficult. Just look at the Gattamelata
for a moment. You have this massive horse.
You have this mass of the human body,
and all of that rests on 4 slender legs.
Beth: And, to show off, you would want to raise
one of the legs of the horse,
as the sculptor did for Marcus Aurelius,
and Donatello was clearly ambitious
in wanting to do that, but he didn't go all the way
in that direction and, instead,
he's got the left hoof up on a cannonball.
Steven: Although, if you look at that left foreleg,
it is so delicately placed on that cannonball,
it's actually a very small point
that is able to anchor the sculpture,
and so it can't really support that much weight,
so he's gone pretty far.
Beth: So, this is a type of sculpture that was lost,
not only because of the loss of the knowledge
of how to cast bronze in this size,
but also because this is a type of monument
that didn't really interest the Middle Ages.
This is a monument that commemorates
a great man, commemorates an individual.
Steven: And it commemorates a great man
in our world, a recent figure,
and, right, this is antithetical
to the medieval celebration of, perhaps, royalty.
Beth: Or, saints you would get in the Middle Ages.
This is not a saint. This is a very talented
military captain, or a Condottiere,
a kind of hired military captain
that was very common at the time.
Steven: And a man who was hired by Venice,
which is a city only about a half hour from Padua,
that was responsible for Venice
actually gaining this territory,
that is, solidifying its foothold,
on terra firma, outside of the lagoon.
Beth: Right. In the early 15th century,
Venice captured more and more towns
on the mainland, and Padua was one of them.
And, so, we're looking, really,
at a military commander who captured Padua.
Now, the monument was commissioned
by Gattamelata's family.
By the way, Gattamelata means honeyed cat.
I don't think we know the origin of that nickname
but it sounds to me like something,
perhaps, his soldiers called him.
Steven: His real name was Erasmo da Narni.
Beth: His family had him buried
inside this important Church of Saint Anthony
- this is a major pilgrimage church -
and then asked the Venetian government
if they could put up a monument to him outside
and, obviously, the Venetian government agreed.
The monument commemorates an individual
but also speaks to the greatness of Padua,
the greatness of Venice.
Steven: He is placed just outside of this enormous
church and, so, there's this way
that that civic pride is contextualized
within this religious society.
Donatello's work is just a tour de force.
There's a kind of sensitivity in the handling
of both the figure and of the horse.
They are both independent figures
that are responding to the world around them,
in their own way, so that the man stands
fully in control, in charge.
He has baton in hand, he looks outward,
the horse also enormously powerful,
but looks down at us,
turns, and seems so animated.
Beth: You can see Donatello
taking up the challenge
and then surpassing the ancient Romans.
When we look at the Marcus Aurelius,
a figure that has nobility,
but lacks military strength and power,
or doesn't project that as much as we have here,
Gattamelata sits up in his stirrups,
presses down, his body is vertical,
balanced by the horizontal of the horse,
and, as we're looking from this vantage point
outside the church, you can see the horse
turning to its left, almost posing,
and the beauty of the horse
showing off its own valor.
Steven: Well, the horse seems to be aware
that we're looking at it.
Beth: Donatello's clearly studied
the anatomy of the horse,
the same way that we know
Donatello was studying human anatomy
at the time, that interest in naturalism
is so evident here.
Steven: It's such a culmination of the ideas
of the early Renaissance. Look, for instance,
at the broad face of the horse,
and look at the way that you can see
some of the veins, and the nostrils are flared.
This is clearly based on direct observation.
The same way that Donatello
was concerned with Contrapposto
in the human body, we have the real movement
of a horse through time, through space.
Beth: A monument that epitomizes Renaissance
humanism in its commemoration of the achievements
of an individual, and in recalling,
and even surpassing, that ancient past.
(piano music playing)