Donatello (c.1386–1466), Lamentation over the Dead Christ, c.1455–1460, Openwork bronze relief, 32.1 × 41.7 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The strangest thing about this small bronze is the holes in it. The background between the figures has been cut clean away, so that the mourners stand against nothing, in a void that should not, by the conventions of fifteenth-century relief, exist at all. Nobody is entirely sure why. The contours of the cut-outs follow the figures so precisely that they can only be deliberate, and that some kind of coloured backing must once have shown through them. The leading current scholarship view is that the backing was a red cloth or stone, the colour of blood, intended to charge the bronze with the symbolism of the Eucharist when seen at close range. On that reading the Lamentation is a finished and deeply unconventional devotional object, made to hang where a private viewer could approach it and meet the body of Christ at the level of the wound.
The relief is small, only 32.1 by 41.7 centimetres, and weighs a little over five and a half kilograms. The Virgin sits centrally with her dead son stretched across her lap, his torso polished and finished to the highest gloss in the entire composition, his face still bearing traces of the casting. Mary Magdalene is at the left, an arm reaching toward the body. Saint John the Evangelist faces in from the right, his head turned away, his features barely modelled, almost dissolved by the chaser’s tool. Behind them stand two further mourning women, a detail often missed in popular descriptions: one buries her face in her hands, the other tears at her hair in a horizontal gesture that crosses the upper register like the bar of the cross now empty above. There are five figures of grief in all, not three, and they are arranged so that the eye is forced through them in sequence, from public lament on the outside to the silent, almost still encounter between mother and son at the centre.
The dating of the relief has been almost as contested as its meaning. One line of argument places it just before Donatello left Florence for Padua in 1443, on the basis of stylistic affinities with the bronze sacristy doors of San Lorenzo. Another, comparing the drapery with the Chellini Madonna roundel (also in the V&A, inv. A.1-1976), argues for a later date, after the artist’s return from Padua. The current consensus, accepted by the V&A and by the catalogues of this major Donatello exhibition in London, places the work in the second half of the 1450s, when the sculptor was in Siena and contracted to design a set of bronze doors for the cathedral. Those doors were never executed. The cathedral’s inventory of 1639 lists a small bronze of approximately the right dimensions, and one strand of scholarship has read the V&A relief as a surviving trial piece for the project.
Whatever its function, the work belongs unmistakably to the visual world of Donatello’s last decade. The high altar reliefs at the Santo in Padua (1446–50), with their crowds of frantic, gesticulating witnesses to the miracles of Saint Anthony, had already developed the sculptor’s vocabulary of compressed space and exaggerated grief; the wooden Mary Magdalene in the Florence Baptistery (c. 1455) had pushed expressive ugliness into a register few previous artists had risked. The London Lamentation concentrates that whole late manner into the size of a domestic devotional panel. What it loses in monumental scale it gains in intimacy, and in the strange way the voids in the bronze let the wall behind the work become part of the work, so that the viewer’s own ground enters into the scene of mourning.
References
Motture, P. (2019) The Culture of Bronze. Making and Meaning in Italian Renaissance Sculpture. London: V&A Publishing.
Motture, P. (ed.) (2023) Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance. London: V&A Publishing
McHam, S.B. (2017) ‘Voids Matter: Donatello’s Lamentation‘, in McHam, S.B. (ed.) Studies in Renaissance Art and Cultures in Honor of Debra Pincus, Artibus et Historiae, 76 (38), pp. 77–93. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/123620146/Voids_Matter_Donatello_s_Lamentation_of_Christ_in_the_Victoria_and_Albert_Museum (Accessed 7 June 2023)