Donatello’s Cantoria: Music and Materiality

• In Event: Donatello

Abstract

The cantoria (organ loft) that Donatello fashioned (1433–39) for Florence Cathedral manifests his material creativity: putti, their marble surfaces unpolished, parade across a frieze adorned with mosaic and behind mosaic-covered columns; decorative marble borders, highlighted with colorful glass, enclose the frieze; and mosaics, reliefs, classicizing bronze busts, and stone roundels occupy the lower level. This luminous structure served as backdrop for instrumental and vocal performances, and recent interpretations have identified the putti as airy spirits that, when excited by music, transmit emotional surges into listeners’ bodies. Recognizing the cantoria’s function as musical, I will examine its materiality in the light of contemporary ideas about sound, in particular sound’s insistent physicality. Donatello, perhaps stimulated by this notion, used hard or resistant media for elements embodying pagan antiquity and, by contrast, granular, roughly chiseled marble for the putti responding — emotionally and, it seems, materially — to the liturgical music and chant surrounding them.

Author

• Amy R. Bloch, University at Albany, SUNY