Donatello’s Genesis reliefs of c. 1405: adapting a Roman statuette in Ghiberti’s collection

The four extant (out of the original six) terracotta reliefs with the early history of Adam and Eve (Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence) are here argued to be certainly by Donatello, to be for gilded companion marriage chests, commissioned by a member of the Corsini family, and among the artist’s earliest known works, datable to around 1405 when he was in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s workshop. Their most intriguing feature is the brilliant, subtle adaptation for one figure of a small Roman bronze of Victoria Romana in Ghiberti’s collection. This is made more consequential as Victory’s figural type is directly based on Nike, the Greek personification of victory, so Donatello unknowingly introduced a Greek figure type into the Italian Renaissance, a figure type that then worked its way through the artist’s later art and indeed that of the Italian Renaissance. On a further plane, it is the previously unrecognized Renaissance point of entry of Aby Warburg’s ‘Florentine nymph’.