The Miracle of the Repentant Son

It is impossible today to read in all its plastic and architectural values the imposing complex of the Padua altar, on which Donatello worked around 1446-50, because the ancona was demolished in the late 16th century and the 19th-century reassembly is a true falsification from the architectural point of view, entirely lacking the richness of polychrome motifs that came from the different colours of the marbles, the bronze and the decorations. In the reliefs of the miracles of St. Anthony, Donatello gives the most complete expression of the lightning synthesis between descriptive record and intense exaltation of the dramatic meaning of the scene which, from the Siena panel to the roundels of the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo, had been the true poetic reason for his use of perspective schiacciato. In the spatial dynamism that consumes every phenomenal datum in a continuous whirl, the emotional tension of the miraculous event in an everyday setting is visually embodied.