‘To know them thoroughly you must have their photographs’: photographing Donatello in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

The emergence of photographic media in the mid-nineteenth century led to an explosion in printed reproductions of works of art, with Donatello and other sculptors working in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy being of particular interest to authors and publishers from the early 1860s onwards. The present article traces how statues and reliefs by Donatello and other Italian Renaissance sculptors were illustrated in a wide range of new photographically based media and disseminated through an equally wide range of new printing processes. It also considers how the academic, museological and even geopolitical concerns of art historians and curators working in Europe and North America in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century influenced the kinds of illustrations that were produced of Renaissance sculpture – and, in turn, how the kinds of illustrations made available to scholars shaped the questions they asked. The article focuses in particular on the photographic, engraved and cast reproductions that innovative curators and scholars such as J. C. Robinson in Britain and Wilhelm von Bode and Heinrich Wölfflin on the Continent commissioned, used and sometimes abandoned when studying Donatello and his contemporaries. This demonstrates that questions about photography’s role in the discourses of art history were raised early, often and particularly insistently in relation to Italian Renaissance sculpture, in the process playing a crucial role in shaping the discipline’s illustrative practices more generally.