Donatello’s Blood of Christ lunette in Torrita di Siena and a Donatello itinerary between Siena, Arezzo and Florence.

Getting lost in Tuscany has inestimable advantages.

Finding yourself in Torrita di Siena, on the doorstep of a red-brick church dedicated to the Saints Flora and Lucilla, and discovering that it houses a valuable work of art by Donatello and his younger sister, an antique copy commissioned by an antiquarian.

In fact, the history of the lunette is a mixed one. It was probably made by Donatello in Siena around 1430, during the period of his best works in stiacciato*, a technique in which the artist excelled.

It is a marble lunette, 4 cm thick, measuring 38.8 cm x 67 cm. The masterpiece adorned the entrance to the Oratory of the Madonna of the Snows (the small Torritese Sistine chapel located at the foot of the old town). In the early 1900s, Wilhelm von Bode, founder of the Berlin museum, described it as a work of art destined for an American collection. What had happened? The Florentine antique dealer Giuseppe Vitali had commissioned a copy and replaced it with the original. Fortunately, both were recovered and can now be seen at the Church of S. Flora and Lucilla.

Tomaso Montanari in his book ‘Getting Lost in Tuscany’ (on sale at the Torrita di Siena tourist office): ‘Finding Donatello in a country church is almost a miracle’. And he describes the features, attributing many of the chisel strokes that forged the lunette to the famous artist. The stormy heavens open up and the risen Christ appears, offering a hand towards the angels and from his hand a spring of blood.

There is no lack of opportunities to admire the master’s works in Tuscany in an itinerary that unfolds over several provinces in the south of the region. From Florence, the richest stop, to Siena and Torrita di Siena and then Arezzo. An entire room, the Hall of Donatello and 15th-century sculpture, is dedicated to the artist’s work in the Bargello Museum in Florence.

The masterpieces include: The Saint George, the two Davids, the youthful marble David sculpted between 1408 and 1409 and the beautiful and more famous bronze David, the particularly realistic terracotta portrait of Niccolò da Uzzano, The Marrocco, a lion made of pietra serena resting a paw on the symbol of Florence and the works of his maturity, such as the bronze Love and the Crucifixion. In the Church of San Lorenzo, the work – testament of a mature Donatello, almost 70 years old: two refined reliefs adorning the Pergamum of the Passion and the Pergamum of the Resurrection.

At Arezzo Cathedral, another early work, an early Donatello stiacciato, the relief depicting the Baptism of Christ for the baptismal font.

In the Cathedral of Siena is instead the famous Banquet of Herod, a gilded bronze relief made by Donatello between 1423 and 1427 for the baptismal font in the Baptistery of Siena, where it still stands today.

*Stiacciato: Term used by Renaissance artists to indicate, in sculpture, that kind of very low relief intended to give a reduction in perspective of the real volume of bodies, thus achieving pictorial value (Treccani).

We inform that the Church of Saints Flora and Lucilla in Torrita di Siena is temporarily closed