Donato di Niccolò Bardi, known as Donatello
(Florence, ca. 1386-1466)
Crucifix
ca. 1406-1408
wood
Florence, Church of Santa Croce, Ministry of the Interior - FEC

02_Donat.SCroce.7513
The work is recorded as being by Donatello in all the ancient sources beginning with Francesco Albertini (1510), commissioned, as Francesco Bocchi wrote in 1591 by “Bernardo or Niccolò del Barbigia” for the altar against the rood screen of the Santa Croce choir. After demolishing this wall, during the Vasari renovation, which separated the monks’ choir from the space in the nave reserved for the faithful in this Franciscan basilica as in many other medieval churches, the Crucifix was transferred into the chapel for many years patronized by the Bardi family in the left end of the transept, where it is still found today.

01_Donat.SCroce.7477
Donatello’s debt to Lorenzo Ghiberti is very obvious (he had worked with him on the bronze reliefs for the north door of the Florentine Baptistery between 1404 and 1407) in the elongation of the figure, the naturalness of the skin accentuated by the original polychromy and, especially, in the folds of the sharp rhythmic progressions of the long loincloth. We are thus at the debut of the young artist, little more than twenty years old, and yet the experience developed at the side of the older master was already heading in the direction of a new and powerful expressivity that would mark Donatello’s entire production.

03_Donat.SCroce.7496
The sculptor modeled the limbs of the strong body heightening the tensions (with the mobile arms to be placed along the sides once Christ was deposed from the cross and placed “in pietà” in the sepulcher during Holy Week or during processions) and he accentuated the agonized suffering in the face, made clear by the sinking of the head between the shoulders, with the locks of hair seemingly soaked in sweat. The criticism of Brunelleschi, (namely, that “he had put a peasant on the cross”) who instead already aspired to a superior classical balance, is easy to understand in front of so much expressivity.