franny choi: Donatello

Donatello is widely considered to be the greatest sculptor of the early Renaissance. One of the formal characteristics of his work was rilievo schiacciato, or flattened relief, in which he applies the rules of perspective so that each figure emerges clearly and logically even though the scene is modeled at a shallow depth.



In the above piece, The Feast of Herod (a relief on the baptismal font in the Baptistry of Siena), Donatello employs overlapping and relative size, as you can see in the arches and the people in the background. He also uses linear perspective in sculpting the two rows of arches.