The Feast of Herod

Placed in the Siena baptismal font alongside other relief scenes by Jacopo della Quercia, Ghiberti and Giovanni Turini, this work, completed between 1423 and 1427, lends itself admirably to grasping Donatello's revolutionary innovation in interpreting both the motifs of naturalistic narrative and those of perspective vision. Reality and lyrical illumination coincide: the complex setting and the various moments of the story are captured in the immediate unity of an instantaneous vision; and perspective, high relief and stiacciato are bent, beyond optical and geometrical rules, to the realistic demands of a simultaneous impression, which is like the translation into visual terms of the dazzling emotional intensity of the drama. “The drama of horror immediately becomes a drama of form” (Luisa Becherucci), and the iconographic and stylistic elements become equally essential, made clear in a synthetic, defining energy of unusual rigour and coherence.