A startling figure has arrived in Britain: a man with a gathering frown, sleepless thoughts and a graze of stubble. His eyes are downcast, his domed forehead lowered. You would recognise him anywhere in the streets of his native Italy: the pensive intellectual, dark-eyed and ascetic, with a tousled black beard. Except that he is from the 15th century, and cast in gleaming gilded bronze.
The original commission was for a medieval reliquary – an object to contain the remains of a saint, in this case the skull of San Rossore, a Roman soldier who converted to Christianity and was martyred for his faith. But the sculptor, Donatello, exceeded every rule and convention. Not only did he imagine the saint as a once-living being, not an icon, but he created this staggering portrait of a real modern man in the active moment of thinking.
