Carving joy and suffering – what Donatello’s sculpture captures

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

Sara Schumacher

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

Culture

Mental Health

Music

25 October 2024

5 min read

Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us

The alt-folk music seeking inspiration from forgotten hymns.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A woman stand at a mixing desk playing a small keyboard.

Lleuwen Steffan plays.

In 2012, musician Lleuwen Steffan first came across a trove of lost Welsh folk hymns preserved in the sound archive of St Fagan’s Museum. Knowing they were not in current hymn books, she undertook further research and discovered they had been excluded from earlier hymn books by the then all-male hymn book committees of their time. Instead, they had been passed on orally, and, although recorded for St Fagan’s by the historian Robin Gwyndaf, had become lost with time and secularization.

Steffan was particularly attracted to these hymns as many dealt with the dark side of the psyche including addiction and mental distress. She has said that many of these hymns, some of which date back to the eighteenth century, are “conversational and the lyrics feel so current”. She is currently taking these hymns back to where they were born through a tour of 50 chapels in Wales but this is not an exercise in nostalgia as her focus is on their contemporary resonance: “Musically, I’m not interested in recreating something from the past. That’s missing the point. Yes, the words are old but the message is always new. The music is free form.”

Although the subject matter of these hymns will have been part of the reason for their exclusion from the hymn books of their day, that same subject matter has been part of worship songs from the time of the Psalms to the present. The Psalms are the worship songs of the people of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament and are the first occasion in ancient literature where the voice of victims is heard and valued.

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann in his book Spirituality of the Psalms provides an insightful and structured overview of the Psalms using three categories: orientation, disorientation, and new orientation. Orientation is the establishment of structure and order. Disorientation is a place of imbalance and nonsense, which is potentially unjust. New orientation is moving forward away from what was and toward new possibilities. As a result, the Psalms provide us with expressions of suffering and hope in the seasons of everyday life. In his book, Brueggemann explains how Psalms of negativity, cries for vengeance, and profound penitence are foundational to a life of faith, and establishes that the reality of deep loss and amazing gifts are held together in a powerful tension.

“This eerie, intriguing and enchanting music... is infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song.”

Rupert Loydell

With such a collection of worship songs as the foundation of worship in churches, and with plainsong in Western churches providing a means by which to chant the Psalms on a daily basis, it should not be surprising that later hymns, such as those being reimagined by Steffan, tap into the dark side of the psyche. The success of albums such as Officium by saxophonist Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, together with Steffan’s own collaboration with pianist Huw Warren and saxophonist Mark Lockheart on Welsh hymns Duw A Wyr (God Only Knows) which is in a similar vein, show how such music can be made relevant to contemporary audiences.

Ghostwriter’s latest album, Tremulant, inhabits similar sonic territory to Steffan’s current Tafod Arian (Silver Tongue) music. Created over several years by Mark Brend, Suzy Mangion, Andrew Rumsey and Michael Weston King, this album has also been borne out of a shared love of antique evangelical hymns and spiritual songs. Using English, Welsh, Scottish and American source material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quartet pieced together their reconstructed hymnal through remote collaboration – creating an album that sounds both ancient and modern.

In his review of Tremulant, Rupert Loydell says it is “a strange ambient gospel album, where what used to be called spirituals and hymns are subverted by echo, wheezing organ and spacious musical interludes, which recontextualise, reimagine, stretch and mutate the very idea of song”. This, he says, “is eerie, intriguing and enchanting music” with “echoes of classic Nico (the cold beauty of Desertshore)”. It's ”declamatory poetry, alt-folk, noise and gentle discord” combined with “calm vocals” is “infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song”. As such, it's not what you’ll hear the local worship band playing, more’s the pity!

“Something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.”

Lleuwen Steffan

Like buses, other revisiting’s and reimagining’s of old hymns and gospel songs are also coming along together. Hymn Time In The Land Of Abandon by Over the Rhine is “Music that we grew up singing, music as present in our formative years as the air we breathed”. Their recordings of hymns have been described as “spare, sweet and subtle renderings that transform the familiar into something fresh and new”.

The musical reimaging involved in Over the Rhine’s reinterpretations of hymns takes them into the space that Brueggemann defines as new orientation, while the sounds and, in some cases, content of the hymns chosen by Steffan and Ghostwriter are more in the realm of his disorientation category. The music making of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter and Over the Rhine takes us to places not commonly accessed by the music used in many church services. As is indicated by the story of hymn book committees omitting hymns that tap into the dark side of the psyche, much of the music used in church services can be located firmly in either the orientation or, sometimes, the new orientation categories.

Given that the arc of Christ’s life, death and resurrection takes us on a similar journey to that which Brueggemann sees occurring in the Book of Psalms, when our music and liturgy fail to go on a similar journey, we are only encountering part of the meaning and message of faith. The recent music of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter, and Over the Rhine is therefore profoundly helpful in beginning to redress that loss of balance in worship by taking us back to a fuller appreciation for the original songbook of the faithful, the Book of Psalms.

In speaking about why she has been drawn again and again to church music, Steffan described her teenage experience of drinking with her “mates in Bangor on the Saturday night” then getting “the last bus back home” and rolling “out of bed the following day to go to Sunday School”. She concluded: “That’s a strange paradox but, you see, something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.” It may well be that that something is the arc of orientation, disorientation and new orientation we encounter and experience in the Psalms.