Victor Coonin

Victor Coonin (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is Professor of Art History at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He specializes in the field of Italian Renaissance art and is the author of From Marble to Flesh: The Biography of Michelangelo's David (The Florentine Press, 2014) and Donatello and the Dawn of Renaissance Art (Reaktion Press, 2019).

"Renaissance" means "rebirth." What, exactly, is "reborn" from the ancient world in the sculpture of someone like Donatello?

In my book on Donatello I argue that he actively helped create what we think of as the Renaissance and was not just a product of his times. He was good friends early on with the architect Brunelleschi and the painter Masaccio.  Together they revolutionized art, primarily by emphasizing an art based upon nature in the sense of prioritizing observation, rationality, science, etc., as opposed to abstraction and an art based on artificial stereotypes. Thus Brunelleschi introduces mathematical perspective, Masaccio shows rational three-dimensional space and figures in his paintings, and Donatello sculpts some of the most authentic-looking characters in the history of art, even if they are fictions.  His incredible depiction of Mary Magdalene comes immediately to mind:  

  

These artists sought to revive an aesthetic based on nature that they thought had been lost in the period we now think of as Medieval (though it wasn’t entirely true!).   

          

Your book on Michelangelo's David is so interesting. Is there a particular work from the ancient world that had an influence on him as he worked on that sculpture?

For Michelangelo the "rebirth" implied by the Renaissance, as seen in David, is that of the classical ideals of sculpture. This is both practical and theoretical in the sense that he sees his role as an artist as trying to make an ideal figure based on nature. The theoretical construct is that nature gives us all the clues of what a perfect being (human or otherwise) should look like but never actually accomplishes it. That's where the artist comes in as creator. Michelangelo's David is a rebirth of a classical premise that one can indeed sculpt an ideal male in terms of proportions, pose, expression, and other life-like forms.

Michelangelo was also up for the technical challenge of carving marble on a huge scale not accomplished since antiquity. Of course, today we are challenging these very notions of an ideal and I particularly like the contemporary riffs on the David that push back on assumptions such as gender, race, body image, pose, even scale. To get back to your initial question, Michelangelo is looking at loads of classical statues that embrace this ideal and if you wanted to choose one for comparison, the Doryphorus comes closest to a model, though Michelangelo would not have seen the versions typically pictured today. He had many more things to look at, however, than we commonly think. Remnants of the classical past were plentiful. Michelangelo was especially enamored of two sculptures that were in Rome: the Belvedere Torso and the Laocoön group, though the latter was discovered only after he had finished the David:

Which figures or episodes from ancient Greece and Rome seem to appear most frequently in the Renaissance art you study?

The various ideals of males and females predominate, whether they are in the form of a god or goddess, an athlete or other guise. The basic assumption was that there existed a common ideal of beauty, an assumption we vigorously challenge today. In the Baroque period that follows we find more interest in the bizarre or unusual but typically in the Renaissance the preferred aesthetic is for the ideal of nature.