Unmissable: Donatello – Sculpting the Renaissance, at the V&A, reviewed

‘Donatello is the real hero of Florentine sculpture’, so Antony Gormley has proclaimed (hugely though he admires Michelangelo). It’s hard to disagree. But the full range of his work is hard to see, spread out as it is on altars and tombs through Florence and elsewhere in Italy. This makes Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance at the V&A an unmissable treat.

Throughout much of the Quattrocento, Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi (c.1386-1466) – or ‘Donatello’ – turned out new notions about what art could look like and how it might be made. In origin he was, as the V&A show emphasises, a goldsmith. Donatello’s two older friends and colleagues, Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti, also began in that profession.

It has often been said that sculpture was the dynamo of the Florentine Renaissance. That’s true – and it all began with a trio of ambitious metalworkers who turned to sculpture – and, in Brunelleschi’s case, architecture too.