The Brazen Serpent

In the ten biblical reliefs, executed between 1484 and 1488, Bellano offers an exhaustive example of that process of dismemberment and drying-up of the various components (culture, reason, natural truth, formal dignity, etc.) which had come to coexist organically, not only in Donatello's integral realism but also in the flowing prose of Florentine classicising naturalism. The language becomes composite, erudite and programmatic in its display of technical virtuosity, not intrinsically motivated, losing the confident illusionistic certainty and the balanced rational synthesis of a serenely unified vision.