Donatello

Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, known as Donatello, was among the artists who gave early Renaissance sculpture its new physical and emotional authority. Working in marble, bronze, wood, and stucco, he moved between monumental public commissions and intensely private devotional images.

His figures resist a single ideal. Some possess the balanced calm associated with classical revival; others are thin, weathered, or caught in abrupt states of feeling. That range made Donatello a decisive model for generations of European sculptors.