The Magic of Donatello

"Historians like to celebrate Donatello for groundbreaking achievements such as making the first bronze nude statue since antiquity in his David for the Medici, or devising a way to apply the rules of single-point perspective to sculpture in his relief of Saint George and the Dragon. These were accomplishments of great significance for the development of art, but still they were secondary to his principal artistic ambition: to show the power and the drama of the human response to contact with the divine. Throughout his career, he depicted holy persons, rapt in religious ecstasy and transfigured by revelation, not only because his commissions required him to, but because experience of the sacred was what he yearned for personally. In art he was a naturalist but one whose idea of nature included the unseen and the unearthly as well as the visible and the mundane."
 
Source : "The Magic of Donatello", The NYRB, 23/04/15