Word: donatello
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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With the passing centuries the personality of Sculptor Donatello has suffered one curious change. Having finished a statue he is not satisfied with it until he has caused Alceo Dossena to take it out in the back yard, smash it with a hammer, skillfully round the edges of the break with fine abrasives, pickle it in acids and stains, then repair it with fetching crudity...
...Dossena sculptures had been sold as original antiques by the great Renaissance artists: Donatello, Verrocchio, Mino da Fiesole, Niccola Pisano, etc., etc. Newspapers, promptly dubbed him "world's greatest forger," and before the excitement was over the notorious Elia Volpi and several other over-shrewd dealers found themselves fined, exposed, and once more in possession of carloads of spurious sculpture. Sculptor Dossena remained within the law. He never sold his work direct to museum or collector, never, so far as investigators could discover, pretended that they were anything but his own work. Nor did he make money. Dealers paid...
...Dossena doesn't copy those artists, he is those artists. He studied Donatello so thoroughly that he projected himself into Donatello's personality. ... He has a multiple personality...
...Florentine Foundling Hospital. Their designer was not Cleveland's Luca Delia Robbia (1400-82), but his prolific nephew, Andrea. Luca, however, perfected the enamel-coated terra cotta ware of which they are made. A suave sculptor, he lacked the virility of his great contemporaries (Verrocchio, Donatello) but had an able talent, designed a number of pieces beloved by romantics. His greatest was the series of singing angels and dancing boys which form the "singing gallery" in the choir of Florence's striped cathedral. Little of his original sculpture exists, for Luca, his nephew Andrea's five sons...
...this review it has been possible to analyze briefly only the most important pieces in a collection which is rounded out, however, by representative works by lesser personalities: I may mention as worthy of the visitor's attention two characteristic marbles by Donatello's follower Antonio Rossellino, an idealized St. Sebastian by Civitali, three typical terra-cottas by della Robbia, and, among the North Italians, the sharply outlined profiles of the Storzas by Amadeo, and Riccio's Entombment with the figures clad in classical garments...