Donatello
Wooden statues

Wood was still used for crucifixes for its lightness. It was also cheap and convenient for carrying it on liturgical processions. Donatello's early crucifix for Santa Croce has lowerable arms for this purpose. Wooden sculptures were almost always painted and partly gilded (as terracotta and even marble and bronze often were).

When a Florentine confraternity in Venice commissioned a statue of John the Baptist, patron saint of Florence, still in the Frari Church there, wood was chosen. The statue is probably the only work by Donatello in the city. He usually did not sign his work, except for some commissions destined for outside Florence. The baptist was signed and dated 1438. Before this was revealed in conservation work it had been dated later, after his stay in Padua, according to the idea that Donatello's works became more and more expressive.

The redating of the Saint John had knock-on consequences for a far more celebrated wooden figure, the Penitent Magdalene long in the Florence Baptistery (now Museo dell'Opera del Duomo), where the carving style is comparable. This is "formidably expressive" in a stark style found in Donatello's last years, and had been dated to around 1456, until the date was found on the other figure; it is now dated generally to the late 1430s, or at any rate before Donatello went to Padua.

According to Kenneth Clark, it shows "a female fakir whose small sunken eyes, gazing across the desert, have beheld the vision of God. Her body is no longer of the least importance to her".

In 2020 the painted wooden crucifix of the church of Sant'Angelo in Legnaia, a suburb of Florence, was attributed by the diocese to Donatello, and dated to the 1460s. This is in a simpler style.
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