Crucifix

This is the sculpture that, according to Vasari's well-known account, Brunelleschi made to show Donatello how a Christ on the Cross should be carved, and which made his friend and rival exclaim: “To you it is granted to make Christs, to me peasants.” Whether or not the anecdote is true (though I consider the two sculptures certainly contemporary, from the years around 1415), it nonetheless illustrates with limpid critical acuity two fundamental and dialectical positions of “Renaissance” poetics and language. While Donatello bends Gothic rhythmic structures to serve as a conventional support for a new classical verism, Brunelleschi leads the canon of proportioned naturalistic beauty of the Latin tradition to express a new accord between reality and idea. He brilliantly recovers the lesson of Giotto: his “Crucifix” is in fact the Renaissance translation of the one painted by Giotto at the end of the 13th century for the same church of S. Maria Novella.