Dr. Rocky Ruggiero

While Donatello is best known for his sublime bronze “David” in the Bargello Museum, his greatest innovation was the development of a technique known as “rilievo schiacciato.” The great Renaissance biographer, Giorgio Vasari wrote, “ And in this genre too Donato [ie Donatello] worked better than any other sculptor, with arte, disegno and inventione.” Rilievo schiacciato, or simply stiacciato, is a type of sculpture where the artist creates an almost impossibly shallow relief, so that objects project only millimeters away from the surface, while also producing a convincing illusion of receding atmospheric space. Join Dr. Rocky as he examines Donatello’s extraordinary production of stiacciato reliefs and the influence they had on future sculptors such as Michelangelo.