The Doctor Will See You Now

There is a room in London packed with Italian Renaissance treasures. The quality is breath-taking, and the quantity (37 by my counting) of Quattrocento masterpieces that have been heaped into one place almost defies belief. The best news is this room is open to the public but, is visited by surprisingly few people. If you enjoy viewing exceptional works of art without being surrounded by crowds then this room should give you that frisson of delight very rarely experienced in today’s world of mass travel and over-visited museums. This special room is home to more than half-a-dozen works by Donatello, but as you enter the room you come face to face with a very serious gentleman indeed. This is the marble portrait bust of the estimable scholar and man of medicine Doctor Giovanni Chellini. Carved in 1456 it is the earliest known work by Antonio Rosellino and is considered to be one of the finest portrait busts from the Renaissance. To me it is an exemplary artistic expression of humanism, I feel an incredible sense of the presence of the sitter whenever I stand near the bust. The face seems to be a true attempt to convey both the likeness and the character of Dr Chellini. Scholars are of the view that the artist used a life-mask to provide an accurate model from which to work in the studio, this is known to have been an increasingly utilised method in 14th Century Italy. The sitter’s ‘pinned back ears’ are taken to be physical evidence of this. Perhaps, if the ears needed to be tied flush to the head to make the mask, it would not have been beyond the abilities of Rosellino to have corrected the angle when carving the marble. We’ll never know, but what we have is an astounding psychologically penetrative portrait of an elderly intellectual, a man of deep experience who has taught generations of students and treated the sick with the limited knowhow available in his time. A man who must have witnessed unbearable suffering while mastering himself to his duties and responsibilities. For me it is all there in the face and in his noble posture, and to add another dimension to this magnetic sculpture, the artist has used a brownish-white marble with shaded colouring in the stone, which gives the effect of a reddening in the man’s cheeks, just as might be apparent in the flesh of an octogenarian.

Doctoring wasn’t all hopeless in mid-fourteenth Century Florence, in 1456 it is recorded that Chellini saved the life of his friend Donatello, and in gratitude Donatello made, and gave his doctor a bronze roundel of the Virgin and Child, which miraculously is on display a few feet from the marble bust. It might be the only time in history that a work by Donatello has been given as a tip.

It is a wonderful room. Where is it? Room 64a in the Victoria and Albert Museum. It takes a bit of finding, but well worth the effort.