Handle with Care: Real and Imagined Encounters with Donatello’s Crucifix in S. Croce

• In Event: Donatello

Abstract

In ca. 1410, Donatello carved a wooden Crucifix for the Franciscan church of S. Croce in Florence, a work that Vasari claimed inspired Brunelleschi to produce his own rival version of the Crucified Christ. Donatello’s Crucifix, recently restored, now probably looks more like it did when it left the sculptor’s workshop than at any time in the past six centuries. While we can analyze its qualities as a material object, as well as consider it in formal, iconographic and socio-historical terms, what does such a collage of impressions actually tell us about how Donatello’s contemporaries encountered the Crucifix, both physically and in their imaginative lives? This paper will present a series of suggestions about how, where and when Donatello’s Crucifix was engaged by different types of beholders, in the process exploring the possibilities and limitations of the various kinds of evidence deployed in art historical analysis.

Author

• Geraldine A. Johnson, University of Oxford