EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR “Donatello: Experimenter and Collaborator”
Presented by Dr. Daniel Zolli
with Additional Commentary by Dr. Rocky Ruggiero
Date & Time:
Thursday, March 6, 2025
2:00 – 3:00pm ET | 11:00am – 12:00pm PT |
7:00 – 8:00pm London
EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | “Donatello: Experimenter and Collaborator”
Presented by Dr. Daniel Zolli
with Additional Commentary by Dr. Rocky Ruggiero
Even in an age filled with versatile artists, Donatello (1386-1466) stands out for his uncommon range. Though best known for the outsize body of marble and bronze sculpture that he produced over a sixty-year career (his bronze David remains a standard introduction to fifteenth-century Italian sculpture), he also worked in wood, clay, wax, cloth, leather, rope, glass, rock crystal, stucco, sandstone, tufa, and alabaster – often using multiple materials in combination. These materials were transformed in myriad ways. They were chiselled, carved, scratched, raked, polished, burnished, cast, painted, varnished, glazed, gilded, silvered, damascened, and tempered with brick dust. To understand why Donatello worked the way he did, this webinar will discuss his workshop, his fiercely collaborative approach to facture, and the uncommon traffic between media and across professional boundaries that came with a life lived in crowded company. Focusing on five (and time permitting, six) sculptures from a twenty-year slice of Donatello’s career, we will consider how the most exciting, strange, and haunting aspects of his art were not the result of heroic individual effort but of group exploration and problem-solving.
The webinar will include a 45-minute lecture followed by 15-minutes of Q&A.
Please note:
Daniel Zolli is Associate Professor of Art History at the Pennsylvania State University. A specialist in late medieval and early modern European art, he has just completed a monograph on practices of experimentation and collaboration in Donatello’s workshops. With this major project now reaching its conclusion, Zolli is in the early stages of preparing two more books: the one an experimental monograph on the fourteenth-century Italian painter Buffalmacco (experimental because no documented works by this artist survive intact), and the other an introduction to the history – and art-historical stakes – of toxic materials and processes (arsenic in paint, mercury in gilding amalgams, lung-damaging silica from ceramics, hydrocarbons in plastics). A New Englander by birth and sports allegiances, Zolli received his BA from Wesleyan University and his PhD from Harvard University.