Americans, Italy and Donatello

According to the American art historian Charles Callahan Perkins, in his groundbreaking study Tuscan Sculptors (1864), Donatello ‘was undoubtedly the greatest Tuscan sculptor before Michael Angelo, and though by no means his equal in vigour and grandeur of conception, by far his superior in delicacy of handling, in truth of detail, rendering of character, and technical ability as a worker in marble or bronze’. Perkins’s nineteenth-century readers, largely composed of members of the American intellectual and cultural elite, were duly impressed by this evocative description. But they were mostly familiar with the name of Donatello because Nathaniel Hawthorne had used it for a character in his popular 1860 novel The Marble Faun ; they couldn’t see a sculpture by the actual artist Donatello without travelling to Italy. Those who did travel visited the churches and museums described in their guidebooks and marvelled at every Donatello they saw. They also purchased photographs to bring their experience home, as well as plaster casts and, sometimes, actual sculptures, although we now recognize that many of those photographs, casts and sculptures had nothing to do with Donatello at all. This article examines the burgeoning interest in Donatello in the nineteenth-century United States by analysing sculpture attributed to him, as well as sales catalogues, guidebooks, photographs and unpublished diaries, letters and account books written by travellers, artists and dealers. Together, this evidence illuminates not only Donatello’s appeal but also the often erroneous understanding of his sculpture during this period.