Jeremiah

Donatello’s “integral realism”, which fuses the various historical, moral and emotional values of a theme in the most concrete representation of a character or an event relived in its actuality, finds full expression in the series of “Prophets” carved over several years for the Campanile. They are no longer evocative images, but ancient personages only in a spiritual sense, through the sorrowful awareness that isolates them, men like all others, from the present in which they live. A coherent basis of humanist realism governs the whole image of the Prophet: just as the relation between body and drapery follows neither the rule of classical harmony nor the broken or melodious signs of Gothic dynamism, but the free course of a natural attitude, so the face has neither the emblematic terribilità of medieval characters nor does it copy the typology of Roman portraits, but individualizes, in a synthesis of psychological nobility and physiognomic truth, an eternal human condition.