Review
Art
Culture
Joy
Suffering
4 min read

Carving joy and suffering – what Donatello’s sculpture captures

The pioneering sculpture of Donatello presents emotional urgency. Sara Schumacher reflects on his art.

Dr Sara Schumacher is Academic Dean and Tutor and Lecturer in Theology & the Arts at St Mellitus College.

A relief sculpture shows the Madonna hold the infant Christ close to her face.
Donatello's Virgin and Child (Pazzi Madonna) sculpture.
Donatello, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

As the weather turns and trees take on their sheen of green, with the seasonal change comes the major spring exhibitions in the nation’s museums. Running from 11 February – 11 June 2023, the Victoria & Albert Museum are hosting a significant exhibition of the work by the Renaissance master, Donatello. Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance traces the sculptor’s life and career, introducing us to his artistic collaborators as well as tracing his legacy within Western art history. A summary of the exhibition has been well described elsewhere and the curators do a fine job of providing context for the viewer that allows one to understand the significance of Donatello’s work. Instead, in this article, I want to try and capture what is felt in what is seen for I think Donatello, in his subject matter and style, is able to hold in tension the paradox of joy and suffering. This paradox is an all-too-common human experience, something that has been explored as Christians journeyed together through Holy Week. While Christian theology has a way of helping make sense of why this paradox exists, art has a way of helping us all to process our lived experience of it.

Through sculpture in different forms, Donatello invites our bodies, through movement and posture, to engage with what or who is presented.

As the exhibition shows, Donatello is famous for being the first in the Renaissance to sculpt a free-standing form. Sculpture, especially free-standing sculpture, requires something of the viewer. In order to see it properly, you have to position yourself in relation to the work and move around it. And while Donatello was clearly a master at this artform, what he invented was rilievo schiacciato, meaning ‘squashed relief’. The stone or bronze is carved with only a few millimetres of depth. In a way, it is like ‘painting’ with stone or bronze, and in doing so, the two-dimensional and three-dimensional are fused. As you move around it, light refracts off the medium, thus highlighting different aspects of the work and changing what you see. Put another way, through sculpture in different forms, Donatello invites our bodies, through movement and posture, to engage with what or who is presented. This embodied connection can start to cultivate empathy as we place ourselves and identify with who or what we see.

The touch of human to human is so real at times that the bronze or stone seems to give way to soft flesh.

Donatello’s work also evokes empathy in the way that he sculpts the human form. In his work, the touch of human to human is so real at times that the bronze or stone seems to give way to soft flesh. This is at its most poignant in the multiple Virgin and Child sculptures displayed throughout the exhibition. And it is here, particularly in the Virgin and Child (Pazzi Madonna), where the paradox of joy and suffering is presented most evocatively.

It is not uncommon to see artistic renderings of the Virgin and Child where distance is held between the two forms. Sometimes, the child looks out at the viewer, away from his mother, inviting devotion through his gaze. In other depictions, the Virgin adopts a posture of worship before her son. The reason for this is theological: the visual divide was a way to bring to the fore the divinity of the human Jesus. However, what we find in the Donatello renderings is something different.

In the Pazzi Madonna, using his trademark schiacciato, Donatello presents a sculpture of emotional urgency. Instead of distance between Virgin and Child, we see a mother who has her face pressed up against her son’s. While the child has a look of contentment and the beginnings of a smile, the mother looks at her child with intensity, marked by sadness. While a worshipping Virgin indicated her awareness of her Son’s glorification through his crucifixion and resurrection, this face tells of a different knowing. The beginning of this child’s life is already marked by the end. And while the end will bring salvation to the world, the anticipation of the end brings suffering for the mother. Mary knows that her son, the one she has borne and is called to nurture into adulthood, will suffer on her behalf and on behalf of the whole world. It will be this suffering that she cannot stop or protect him from. And while the work tells of joy in the intimacy and tenderness between mother and child, this joy is held in tension with the suffering that will come from their respective acts of obedience. The worst that a mother could imagine for her child must happen because in that worst moment is, paradoxically, the hope for the world. Where their faces meet in this sculpture, joy and suffering are visibly held together.

What does it mean for us to press our suffering faces against the face of Jesus? As we look into his eyes of joy, how does that transform the way we see the world and our circumstances? The Christian story is one of hope. In the end, all things will be made right and there will be an end to all suffering and tears. And while we live with and through real pain, as we see with Donatello, we see that this human paradox can be held now for its resolution will come.

Article
Character
Culture
Film & TV
Music
4 min read

We want to feel the main character energy of each of the Beatles

But is love all we need?

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Four actors dressed in black stand together
The new cast.
Neal Street Productions.

One of the joys of moving into central London is the nostalgia. You can 'remember' anything in London, but for a Beatles fan like me (one year I was in the top one per cent of listeners globally on Spotify - impressive, I know - and it was before I had kids), the aesthetic of central London is deeply connected to the fab four. I'm aware it's not Liverpool but look what London has to offer fans of the fab four.  Abbey Road’s crossing, the rooftop performance in Savile Row, or the amount of time the fab four spent just here for the famous launch of Sgt Pepper. Walking around these streets with my headphones in, it's impossible not to smile at music that is faultlessly happy-making. 

Sir Sam Mendes, however, is taking the immersive Beatles experience to a whole new level. Four coordinated films will be released in 2028 in a stunning act of ambition and delayed gratification. Mendes' production company says it will be the first 'bingeable theatrical experience.' 

Now that the cast have been revealed, lots of questions remain: How long will the films be? Will they all be released at exactly the same time? Will there be Lord of the Rings viewing marathons? By the way - did you hear about the failed pitch for a Lord of the Rings film starring John as Gollum, Paul as Frodo, George as Gandalf and Ringo as Sam? We've missed that particular masterpiece, as Tolkien turned it down, as did Stanley Kubrick for that matter. The man it did fall to, Peter Jackson, recently also released a Beatles television experience in Get Back. Even for Beatles diehards like me I've not made it through all 468 minutes. But I saw enough to see Shakespeare being written. 

Screenwriter Peter Straughan (Wolf Hall, Conclave) said that the different script writers for the not-so-imminent upcoming four films were "firewalled off from each other", so we receive four takes truly inhabiting the shoes of each protagonist. Band members wanting their own 'main character energy'? Surely not! 

Only Mendes knows how the films will tie together. "Each one is told from the particular perspective of just one of the guys," Sir Sam told CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Monday. "They intersect in different ways - sometimes overlapping, sometimes not." 

"They're four very different human beings. Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply. But together, all four films will tell the story of the greatest band in history." 

An omnipresent director still has infinite attention for each one us within a grander narrative arc. 

Lennon and McCartney are undeniably geniuses. But with the Beatles, they were always greater than the sum of their parts. Even the songs that were solos were credited to Lennon/McCartney. Their solo works, no disrespect, never quite reached the dizzying heights of their collective efforts. 

But a biopic for each bandmember is a terribly 2020s take. We want to feel that main character energy pulsing through our veins. While we want to feel part of something bigger, we want to feel that our lives are unique and distinct, not derivative (the latter not being a problem for The Beatles). 

But a quartet of films, "challenging the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies", harmonising in new ways (remind you of anything as subversive and groundbreaking?) provides an utterly lovely step-change in cinema. There's been no shortage of Beatles biographies and films, but this new concept comes closer to art imitating life. Our lives have to be lived independently, but are somehow made more meaningful and rich in connection and collaboration with others.  

The philosopher Tom Morris wrote: "There are two striking human passions, the passion for uniqueness and the passion for union. Each of us wants to be recognised as a unique member of the human race. We want to stand apart from the crowd in some way. We want our own dignity and value. But at the same time, we have a passion for union, for belonging, even for merging our identities into a greater unity in which we can have a place, a role, a value.” 

Can those passions be held in tension? The Christian faith, while commending us to be outward-focused, does more than polyphonic films. It says that each of us are worthy of our own 'cinematic events'. Yes, we mightn't have started living until we have broken free from our own confines to the concerns of broader humanity, as Martin Luther King said, but an omnipresent director still has infinite attention for each one us within a grander narrative arc. 

All you need is love, they sang. But that love needs the perfect perspective of someone else. 

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