When Donatello and Masaccio agreed on the Renaissance revolution in Pisa.

The Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa holds a very special record: it is the only museum in the world where, in the same building, it is possible to see a work by Donatello and a work by Masaccio, that is, by the father of Renaissance sculpture and the father of Renaissance painting. Donatello’s Reliquary Bust of San Rossore and Masaccio’s Saint Paul are preserved here, dialoguing within a short distance of each other, offering the public the chance to admire two of the first products of the new language that would spread from Florence throughout Italy and Europe. Two works profoundly linked to Pisa, since Masaccio’s saint is part of the polyptych that the artist painted in 1426 for the notary Giuliano di Colino degli Scarsi and ch’was intended for the church of the Carmine in Pisa, while the reliquary bust, although made for a Florentine church, the church of Ognissanti, was intended to house the relic of a saint whose cult is strongly rooted in Pisa, namely Saint Lussorio: for the Pisans, san Rossore.

Of the two, the Reliquary Bust of San Rossore is surely the lesser known work, if only because less remains of Masaccio than we are given to see of Donatello (not least because Masaccio, who died when he was only twenty-seven years old, did not have many opportunities to demonstrate his talent), and because Donatello is celebrated, at least among the general public, mainly for his monumental works. The bust preserved in the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, however, is surely one of his finest works, a work in which the saint’s features are outlined with a striking and acute naturalism, which is expressed especially in thefrowning expression, in the downward-looking eyes (it was in fact intended to be displayed in an elevated position), in the movement of the facial muscles, in the folds of the robes, in the decorations of the armor, even in the locks of the slightly ruffled hair or in the mustache and goatee: more than a reliquary it seems to be a portrait, admittedly idealized, but animated by obvious purposes of credibility.

It was commissioned from him in 1422 by the humble friars of Florence, for the church of Ognissanti: they had come into possession of a relic that until then had been preserved precisely in Pisa, namely the skull of Saint Lussorio, and they wanted a container that could worthily accommodate that most precious find. The story of Saint Lussorio is lost in Diocletian’s Rome, at the time of the persecutions against the Christians: we know from a text about him, namely the Passio sancti Luxorii martyris, written perhaps in the 8th century but whose oldest codex dates back at least four centuries later, that Lussorio must have been a soldier of Sardinian origin who was deeply affected by the psalms at a certain point in his life, to the point of converting to Christianity. The hagiographical account then follows the pattern of that of so many other Christian martyrs of the time: denounced as a worshipper of the God of Christians, he was arrested, tried and placed before the choice between sacrifice to the pagan gods and capital punishment, and in the face of his firm resolve to follow in his belief, Lussorio was put to death, in his case by beheading. The reason for the strong veneration of Lussorio in Pisa, where his name has been mispronounced as “Rossore” as a result of the rotacism of his Latin name (from Luxorius to Ruxorius), is due to the ancient relations between the city and Sardinia: in medieval times much of the island was a possession of the Republic of Pisa, and tradition has it that the saint’s relics were transported in 1088 from Sardinia to the Pisan cathedral. And as early as the 11th century there was a church in Pisa dedicated to St. Lussorio, to which a monastery was later annexed and where the relic of the skull was kept for a long time: the site, however, was abandoned as early as the 13th century because it was subject to frequent flooding of the Arno, which is why the relics were moved. The coenoby of San Rossore was annexed to the convent of San Torpè, which belonged to the humble friars, who decided for some reason to transfer the relic to Florence in 1422. The skull of St. Rossore was then kept in Florence until 1570, when it passed to the Knights of St. Stephen, who, in 1591, brought it back to Pisa, to the church of Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri, along with the reliquary that contained it. Donatello’s work remained in the church until the late 1570s, at which time, for security reasons (it had already been stolen once, and later found, in 1977), it was transferred to the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, where it was also restored, in 1984.

Although the Reliquary Bust of San Rossore is not, as mentioned above, perhaps one of Donatello’s best-known works, this does not mean that it is not among his most important works. In addition to being an extraordinary masterpiece of goldsmithing (it is made of gilded and silver-plated bronze), the work housed in the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo can also be considered the earliest example of a modern reliquary, a sumptuous piece that sanctioned a watershed in regard to the traditional medieval reliquary, and not only toward the type of reliquary that often took the form of a casket, when it was not a small miniature architecture. Donatello’s work initiated the Renaissance reliquary in the form of a bust-portrait, renewing the tradition of reliquary busts, the anthropomorphic reliquaries of medieval times: the best-known example is probably the Bust of St. Ursula now in the Pinacoteca Comunale in Castiglion Fiorentino, another extraordinary piece, the work of a Rhenish manufacture, probably from the third decade of the 14th century. Donatello introduces several innovations to reinvigorate this tradition in which he is deeply rooted, even beyond the realistic features of a bust that, by stylistic affinities, is perhaps closer to Roman portraits than to medieval reliquaries: his Reliquary Bust of San Rossore, for example, is cast in bronze (the first case in history for a reliquary) and is not made of embossed metal foil (like the Castiglion Fiorentino reliquary, which is made of silver foil). Medieval reliquary busts, scholar Anita Moskowitz has written, often had “eyes wide open and connoted motionless,” as seen in what the art historian says may have been the example that Donatello, for reasons of accessibility, had in mind, namely the bust of Saint Zanobi, a 14th-century work that held the relics of the Florentine saint. And these were then typified busts, whereas Donatello’s work is highly individualized: the artist, according to Moskowitz, may have been inspired (as well as, in his view, by the image of himself, and thus the bust may also contain elements of self-portraiture) by certain Roman portraits that could be seen in the Florence of the time (the example being a bust of Caesar now in the Uffizi collections).

Not only that: although the Reliquary Bust of San Rossore depicts a person whose face was not known, and Donatello therefore worked on his work somewhat as one might work on the portrait of a fictional character, without therefore having a real model to refer to, thePisa work in fact opens Renaissance portraiture in sculpture, since Donatello’s intent is to give the sitter the impression that he or she is standing before a real person: Irving Lavin noted that Donatello’s Saint Lussorio functions simultaneously as both a portrait and an object, and the latter feature was made evident by only one element (because, seeing the bust without lingering too much on the details up close, one would not know that the saint’s canopy opens to accommodate the relic). This is a subtlety that in fact not everyone notices, or at least does not consider it from this point of view: that is, we are talking about the saint’s cloak, which, instead of falling down along the body as it would normally do if that were a person’s torso, describes on the contrary horizontal folds on the supporting plane. And the same goes for the bangs of the cuirass that bend unnaturally if we think of a standing subject, but realistically if we observe the reliquary for what it actually is. It is as if Donatello, with this contrivance, is telling us that that is not a real portrait: it is simply a container, an object that has human likeness.

As for the material aspects, the most immediate precedent is the St. Louis of Toulouse that Donatello made, with the same technique he would later use for the reliquary bust, for the Parte Guelfa of Florence, which had asked the sculptor for a statue of its patron saint, resolved in the same way the artist would resolve the reliquary bust: “both sculptures,” scholar Laura Cavazzini has written, “are cast in several pieces and entirely clad in gold; both the youthful and only slightly troubled face of the Franciscan saint and the mature and intimately restless face of the warrior martyr, then, emerge from the tangles of the tormented cloths of their respective cloaks, soliciting an emotional dialogue with the viewer.” As early as 1993, however, Artur Rosenauer noted the affinity with the St. Louis of Toulouse, noting moreover that "the incisiveness of the chiseling shows a certain parallelism with the Banquet of Herod from the baptismal font in Siena, cleaned and chiseled between 1425 and 1427." the Pisa work thus comes at a particularly fertile moment in Donatello’s career, a time when the artist, who had not yet reached the age of forty, had not stopped innovating, experimenting with solutions never seen before, and solving every commission with exciting originality.

We can imagine that even Masaccio must have looked with admiration at the product of his colleague’s hands. What is certain is that the two knew each other: in fact, there is a note in the notebook of the notary Giuliano di Colino degli Scarsi, who, we recall, had commissioned from Masaccio the work that later went down in history as the Pisa Polyptych, from which we learn that an installment of the payment due to the painter for the work was paid directly to Donatello, who probably had a claim on Masaccio. Both, after all, were working in Florence, but not only that: both, in 1426, had found themselves in Pisa, since Donatello had moved here that year to work with Michelozzo on one of his most ambitious works, the funeral monument of Cardinal Brancaccio that was destined for the church of Sant’Angelo a Nilo in Naples, where it can still be admired today. And in painting his saint, perhaps Masaccio had remembered the sculptor’s work: “The complex plastic texture of the apostle’s cloak, of a delicate pale pink that stands out against the saffron yellow of the robe underneath,” Cavazzini writes again, “would be enough on its own to justify Vasari’s assertion that Masaccio - even as a painter - had fine-tuned his perspective and intensely natural language by taking Donatello’s works as a model.” One could then advance a parallel with the earlier work: "The smoldering surface of the fabrics painted by Masaccio, the studied incidence of light, which refracts on the apostle’s petrous garments in mobile reverberations, the slow turning in on itself of the figure, whose silhouette emerges overbearingly from the gold of the background, seem to have been studied directly on San Ludovico della Parte Guelfa."

Here they are, then, Masaccio and Donatello, together ushering in modernity. Perhaps the two confronted each other with a certain awareness, and perhaps right there in Pisa, not far from where we now admire the Reliquary Bust of San Rossore and the San Paolo. Alessandro Parronchi considered probable the idea “that during 1426 in Pisa a common program was agreed upon between Donatello and Masaccio. And perhaps it was that occasional familiarity that made Masaccio discover a way to enter Donatello’s world, which before might even have intimidated him because of its vastness.” Donatello, in other words, was the first sculptor to sense that artists would have to deal with the theme of natural reality, concrete reality, the tangible. And Masaccio, having the opportunity to frequent him in Pisa, perhaps through him had to come to the same conclusions by seeking a contact with reality that was unheard of for painting, and that would soon be expressed especially in the Trinity of Santa Maria Novella. In Pisa, Parronchi thought, the two agreed on a quest based on “the sense of the specular vision on which Brunelleschi’s discovery is founded,” inaugurating “an art that through the definition of the individual draws on the universal.” The Renaissance revolution also passed through Pisa.

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