How to Carve Marble Like Italian Master Donatello

In a video for the Victoria and Albert Museum, sculptor Simon Smith shows us how Renaissance sculptor Donatello might have approached carving a piece from marble, which Smith calls “the Emperor of all stones”.

It’s all about trapping shadows. Carving is all about having deep cuts here and lighter here and the angle here and how the light plays on it. And certainly in relief…because relief carving like this, it’s kind of halfway between sculpture and drawing. If you’re doing a three-dimensional sculpture, if a form runs around the back you just carve it so it goes around the back, but with this you have to give the illusion of it running around the back like a drawing. You’ve got to make something look like it turns around and comes out the other side even though it really is just going into the block. And that’s all about angles and shadow and light.

• art
• Donatello
• how to
• Simon Smith
• video