Displaying items by tag: donatello

Andrew Butterfield, an art dealer and Renaissance scholar, had seen the two-and-a-half-foot tall wooden sculpture several years before, in a photograph, and thought it was “really fantastic.”

“It felt so much like the embodiment of the early Renaissance,” he said recently. He passed on making an offer then. But the gilded figure of a plump, graceful cherub, or putto, nagged at him, and when he finally did buy it, in 2012, it set him off down an art-historical detective trail that made him glad he followed his instincts. Mr. Butterfield and several other experts he has enlisted now believe the statue is a lost work by Donatello, one of the defining artists of the Renaissance, and a rare example of the artist’s work in wood, making the discovery not only a major addition to Donatello’s surviving corpus but also to the history of Western sculpture.

The Renaissance sculptures in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, including the replica of Michelangelo’s David, will soon have a shiny new neighbor: Jeff Koons’s Pluto and Proserpina (2010-13). The 11ft work in gold-colored stainless steel will stand in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence’s town hall and civic museum, from September 25 until December 28. Inside, Koons’s Gazing Ball (Barberini Faun) (2013), from his series of plaster casts of Greco-Roman sculptures, will be presented in the Hall of Lilies, where Donatello’s original bronze Judith and Holofernes (around 1457-64) is on permanent display.

New York's Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA) will close its doors this summer, after operating for a decade. The institution's current Donatello exhibition will remain on view through June 14, as planned, but MOBIA will cease operations on June 30, 2015, the museum announced today.

"Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces From Florence Cathedral," which features 25 pieces from the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, many of which had never before left Italy, has been a blockbuster by the small museum's standards. Since opening in mid-February, the show has very nearly surpassed MOBIA's all-time high for annual attendance with 20,000 visitors.

Works damaged in two devastating fires in 1945 that destroyed around 400 paintings and sculptures stored in Berlin’s Friedrichshain bunker, including pieces by Caravaggio, Rubens and Donatello, are being presented in a new exhibition at the Bode Museum. “The Missing Museum: the Berlin Sculpture and Paintings Collections 70 Years after World War II”, which opened March 19, explores ethical and practical decisions museums face in regards to war-damaged works, namely whether they should be restored or left in their ruined state as a permanent reminder of the horrors of the conflict.

“One of the exhibition’s objectives is to bring these works back from oblivion into people’s consciousness,” says Julien Chapuis, the museum’s deputy director and curator of the show, adding that many of the pieces have not been exhibited since 1939.

The show called “Sculpture in the Age of Donatello" opens tomorrow at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York, and Donatello's "Saint John the Evangelist," from around 1412, is one of its treasures. (Many experts can't imagine why such a masterpiece has made the risky trip from Florence without any scholarly motive, but that's a story for another day – and that I happen to have already written).

This sculpture may be from the "age of Donatello," but when seen up on a plinth in a modern museum, it could be that it has really become modern art.

The Museum of Biblical Art in New York City will host an unprecedented exhibition of sculptures by Donatello along with works by Filippo Brunelleschi, Luca della Robbia, Nanni di Banco, and others. The works, which were created for the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, have never been on view in the United States.

“Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral” will feature 23 works created for Florence’s Duomo by leading masters of the Italian Renaissance. Highlights include Donatello’s “Lo Zuccone (Habbakuk),” which was created during the most productive period of his career; two recently restored bronze heads, one by Donatello and the other by Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, which were made for the singing gallery that Donatello fashioned for the Duomo’s interior; and three early 15th-century stone reliefs derived from scenes from the Florence Baptistery’s Gates of Paradise by Lorenzo Ghiberti. A full-scale cast of Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise will be on view in New York City at a location that will be announced in the months leading up to the monumental exhibition.

The Museum of Biblical Art, an independent museum that explores the Bible’s impact on art, is the sole venue for the exhibition. The Duomo is currently undergoing an expansion and renovation that is expected to reach completion in October 2015.      

“Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral” will be on view at the Museum of Biblical Art from February 20 through June 14, 2015.