The shape of emotion

Donatello was the first genius of the Renaissance, but his raw, expressive work also challenges all our assumptions about the period. He is justly the star of the V&A's triumphant new galleries

The Ricordanze of Giovanni Chellini da San Miniato are terse little comments, on the whole. It was the custom for men of substance in Renaissance Florence to keep a kind of economic diary, mostly a record of debits and credits, of dowries paid and daughters married off. Some of these manuscripts break out of genre to become personal, but Chellini's is pretty matter of fact. It takes an earthquake to get this medical man excited; that, or Donatello.

"I record . . . that a terrible earthquake visited Florence", he writes breathlessly one day, telling how people went in their panic to the church of the Santissima Annunziata, the city's holiest shrine. A few years later he's shaken again, this time by joy, at a very special gift from a celebrity patient: "I record that on 27 August 1456, when I was treating Donato, called Donatello, the singular and leading master of making statues of bronze and wood and terracotta . . . in his kindness and for my effective treatment of his illness, he gave me a tondo the size of a plate."

You can see why the doctor was so excited, looking at Donatello's gift in the new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the V&A. It was a masterpiece. Donatello deliberately makes the Virgin Mary too tall for the little circle that holds her. She bends her head down toward Christ, but this is essential because if she straightened up she'd bump her head on the top of the roundel; a structure in front of her stresses enclosure, two angels prevent sideways movement. It is a compressed image of maternal love: Donatello contrives a sense of claustrophobia to convey the most intimate of human bonds.

Chellini's record of his gift from a famous patient is a rare glimpse into the real world of art nearly a century before Vasari came along to write up the lives of Italian artists. It reveals that in Florence by the 1450s, artists were stars. Donatello could pay his bills with art. But this isn't what matters. What matters is the emotion it exposes. Chellini seems touched by Donatello's "cortesia", and a little surprised. And what comes to us down the centuries is the passionate personality of this artist. The roundel was probably something he already had in his workshop – it is made so you can cast glass replicas from its reverse, and he had perhaps already done that. But it was a beautiful, special thing. He picked it up that day impulsively and gave it to Chellini, who struggled to make sense of the generosity – it must have been down to the "merit" of his medicine, he supposed.

This marvellous gift is all of a piece with the tempestuous personality and art of Donatello, the first expressionist. Nearly 500 years before Van Gogh equated art and emotion, Donatello was making art that rejects beauty in favour of emotional truth. You see it in the willed awkwardness of Mary's posture in the Chellini roundel, bending down to fit in the picture, where a conventional artist would have scaled her down to leave space between her and the edge. The love between her and her child is squashed into the image, something vast held in a small bronze. What could be further from the clichéd modern idea that Renaissance art is all about harmony, beauty and grace?

Paradoxically, however, Donatello did as much as anyone to invent Renaissance art. He started something that was still being worked out long after his death in the art of Titian and Tintoretto. That is why he is the star of the great new galleries of Renaissance art that are about to open at the V&A.

The bronze becomes even more moving when you set it alongside the portrait bust of the same Giovanni Chellini that Antonio Rossellino carved in the year Donatello made his gift, 1456, when the doctor was 84. You can do that in South Kensington because, remarkably, both works are owned by the V&A. This museum quite simply has the best collection of three-dimensional Renaissance art outside Italy. Other museums – the Louvre, the Met in New York – have their Renaissance marvels but you'd have to go to Florence to find a more first-rate, more intimate collection of 15th- and 16th-century Italian objects than the V&A's. Giambologna's towering sculpture of Samson Slaying a Philistine – a violent masterpiece in the same league as his Rape of the Sabines, which stands under the Loggia of the Signoria in Florence – and a bronze trial piece for the snake-haired head of Medusa made by Cellini when he was casting his Perseus for that same place make this a collection that goes to the heart of its subject. For a long time the grandeur of the Renaissance collection was hidden by dowdy presentation, but now it is to hold court in triumphant new galleries. New rooms dedicated to medieval art suddenly open out into the light and space of the new age that started in Italy in the early 1400s in a soaring hall with brightly painted sculptures by the Della Robbia family, austere tombs, a working fountain, even an equestrian monument – it's an indoor piazza leading to more intimate spaces where a Leonardo da Vinci notebook will be on display among all the bronze satyrs, opulent tapestries, ceramics and frescos.

While the museum's Leonardo manuscript is incorporated in its displays of the Renaissance world, Donatello is given a special suite. That is only right, because he was the first genius of this art movement – one of its founders, and the most soulful of them.

There's a danger in abundance. The V&A owns an unrivalled host of luxury early modern objects, and not just Italian ones – there are plenty of silver grotesques from Nuremberg, too. This feeds a current academic fashion to see the Renaissance as above all a consumerist splurge. It was the first consumer society, we're told, with rich merchants spending their cash on sweetmeat trays and gilded gods: we should see these as evidence of lifestyle choices, not high art. The catalogue for these new galleries is subtitled "People and Possessions".

I'd prefer "People and Art" because, in the end, what's amazing about all these objects is not that people spent money on stuff. They always do that. The Medici and the Rucellai and the Strozzi in 15th-century Florence could have bought trash. But in fact they sponsored a cultural revolution, a renewal of imagination, an explosion of experiment. That is why it's only right that Donatello gets a special place in these galleries. He reminds us that the Renaissance wasn't just about marriage chests; it was about genius.

Donatello's career is a constellation of firsts. He created the first perspective picture in a relief carved beneath his statue of St George in a street tabernacle in Florence in about 1417. A few years later he brought perspective to perfection in his relief of The Feast of Herod on the font in Siena's baptistry. He also created the first free-standing nude statue since antiquity, his bronze David. He was part of an avant garde group who saw themselves as renewing art. The group's spokesman, Leon Battista Alberti, wrote to their mutual friend Filippo Brunelleschi, architect of Florence's cathedral dome, expressing his joy that, just when he thought the miracles of the ancient world would never be repeated, "I recognised in many, but above all in you, Filippo, and in our great friend the sculptor Donatello . . . a genius in no way inferior to any of the ancients who gained fame in these arts."

The Renaissance was a conscious attempt to resurrect the learning and art of ancient Greece and Rome. It started in Florence, where intellectuals translated Plato and rediscovered the works of Lucretius and Tacitus – and where Donatello and his circle began to emulate and even compete with the classical remains in which Italy is so rich.

The Renaissance is born in Donatello's works. In his early marble figure of David, the sinuous, eccentric lines of gothic carving, soon to be dismissed in Italy as barbarous, are still visible – the body curves weirdly and David is clothed, typically for medieval art but in a way that would soon be anathema to classicising Italians, in carved skins. As if in a textbook demonstration of change, Donatello later returned to the theme of this biblical hero to create what is essentially the first true Renaissance statue: his bronze David, erect, naked except for ornate armoured legwear and a tilted hat, hand on hip, explicitly rivalling all the statues of naked young men that survive from ancient Rome. But Donatello's art explodes every assumption we have about the Renaissance.

At the V&A you can see not only his marble relief of the assumption and his Chellini gift but also – thanks to those wacky Victorians who created this museum's unique Cast Courts, with their full-scale replicas of sculpture and architecture – copies of his large-scale masterpieces in Florence. Above all it's worth looking at the V&A's cast of his cantoria, a gallery created for Florence cathedral whose original is today in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in the city where it was made. Here you can see what is so original about the way he responded to classical models. The shape of the cantoria – a rectangular box – resembles a Roman sarcophagus, and Donatello makes its classical quality explicit by decorating it with ranks of repeated ornament. But between the columns there's an explosion of life – lots of naked children running about wildly, as if bursting out of the controlling frame. Donatello doesn't find calm in classical art – he finds drama. The very strength of the classical frame is a means to energise the figures, to show them erupting from their confines. The cantoria is like a burst of trumpets.

Look at his nude David, and the tension is multiplied. The nude had been lost to European art for a thousand years for a reason – it was seen as devilish. Christianity associated nude statues with the devil: on a stained-glass window in Canterbury Cathedral, Christ leads pagans away from a blue statue of a pagan god that is simultaneously a classical nude and an image of the devil. When a classical Venus was dug up in Siena, the crowd destroyed it as a thing of evil.

Donatello made his nude to stand in the courtyard of the Medici palace, protected from the common herd, to be understood by the intelligentsia who saw that nude Greco-Roman statues unveiled the body's true beauty. But it is not complacent. It is provocative. The sensationalism of his bronze David is still vivid more than 500 years after it was made. He emphasises the youth's shiny buttocks, deploys the helmet and leggings as fashion objects to accentuate David's nakedness – like Renaissance lingerie. Why would an artist making the first nude statue in centuries deliberately draw attention to its dangerous sexy qualities? He doesn't want blandly to posit the nude as fine art. He openly associates it with carnal desire. His image of a body makes us aware of our own.

This brings us back to the gift that the sculptor, in old age, gave his doctor. The creator of beautiful bodies now had an old, sick body. After a lifetime's creation that took him to Siena and to Padua to spread the Renaissance message, Donatello came back in the 1450s to Florence. There's one obvious fact about the roundel he gave to Chellini – he was grateful because Chellini healed him. In other words, his health was poor, his body fraught, and this shows mightily in his late art. In 1456, when he was treated by the doctor, Donatello was about 70 and had a decade to live. It was a decade of agony, or so Donatello tells us in his art. If Chellini healed him, it was only temporarily. Whatever was wrong, it seems to have eaten at his imagination. His art is always highly expressive. In his last years it becomes nightmarish.

This is true of his Judith and Holofernes in Florence, with its dark vision of a cowled woman about to behead a drugged man, a statue that stuck in the throat of Florence, to paraphrase a poem about public art by Robert Lowell: at once admired and feared. It is true of his painted wooden statue of an emaciated Mary Magdalene, her once beautiful flesh scorched and withered. And it is true of what is, for me, the V&A's greatest work by Donatello. Many would say this is his marble relief of the assumption, which uses the same revolutionary technique as his relief of St George and the dragon. The gathered disciples have cavernous faces, Leonardesque faces. And yet, the work that most holds and startles me here is another, less perfected piece – his late Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, a wild silhouette of grieving bodies.

The people mourning a Christ whose face seems based on the Turin shroud are waving their arms, clutching their faces, running they don't know where. Realism becomes surrealism, as long hair like matted rope flows and tangles in shapes that have nothing to do with observation, and everything to do with giving shape to emotion. Picasso, centuries later, would portray a weeping woman whose tear nurtures a butterfly. Donatello creates a scene that seems to have taken shape from tears. But he does not have Picasso's optimism. This is a scream of despair – an acrid refusal to be consoled. To emphasise its rawness, he didn't polish it, preferring to leave it in the rough.

It might be tempting to say that Donatello has somehow "abandoned" the Renaissance in this work – that in his macabre late sculptures he repudiates the poise and grace of classical art and returns to a medieval gloom. This would be a misunderstanding. There's as much classicism in the Lamentation as in any of his works – in fact, the figures, especially those at the upper right, refer directly to Roman scenes of grieving he saw on sarcophagi.

We have got the Renaissance wrong. We think it's about beautiful Madonnas, lovely objets d'art, and a smooth classical harmony. But we're confusing it with the later, completely antithetical classical revival in the 18th century. Look, in the V&A, at Canova's 18th-century neoclassical marble of Theseus defeating the Minotaur: now there is smooth, untroubled, rational classicism crushing the irrational – easily, beneath its chilly foot. The Renaissance is the opposite. It is about energy and life, and the idea of reason triumphing over feeling would have puzzled Donatello as much as it would have startled the crazed, impulsive rulers of the age, such as Henry VIII or Cesare Borgia.

Renaissance art is not just a thing of beauty, but of self-expression. It is strange, it is disconcerting, it is all the things we, today, want art to be. You can see that in Donatello and throughout these wonderful new galleries.

The Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the V&A open on 2 December. Tel: 020 7942 2000.

This week's exhibitions previews

Roger Hilton, Cambridge

At Christmas 1972, Roger Hilton started mischievously to play with the poster paints presented to one of his sons. Largely confined to bed due to prolonged addiction to booze and fags, Hilton, through the remaining three years of his life, went on to produce one of the most touching and enchanting painting series of the 20th century. While his contemporaries struggled to regain the gestural spontaneity of children's doodles, Hilton – in works of utterly compelling maturity – brought it off again and again, pouring out images of deceptive innocence: cheeky nudes, bright red sailing boats, circus elephants and blazing suns.

Kettle's Yard, Sat to 10 Jan

Robert Clark

Vice Versa, Bristol

There's a chance to discover what artists are up to over the water this week, with the opening of Vice Versa, an exhibition between 11 artists from Bristol and Groningen in the Netherlands. The group show, held alongside a programme of workshops and talks, has been a year-long project in which collaborative events have taken place in both cities, and the results are nothing if not intriguing. Tamany Baker, Marian Brugman, Arantxa Echarte, Ilhona Hakvoort, Mattijs Hendriks, Tanja Isbarn, Penny Jones, Natasha MacVoy, Mel Shearsmith, Merijn Vrij and Moniek Westerman have all created thought-provoking art which includes Echarte's floral tribute to globalisation, Westerman's dietary carpet representing the amount of sugar consumed by one person and Baker's manipulated photographs. With exhibitions occurring in Groningen and Bristol, it is a thoroughly cross-cultural exchange.

Flash Parade, Fri to 6 Dec 

Jessica Lack

FrenchMottershead: SHOPS, Sheffield

FrenchMottershead, AKA collaborative duo Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead, go in for a peculiar form of art as socio-economic research with their two-year documentation of the wheelings and dealings of small shop owners around the world. Among the results, we see Howcrofts' Sheffield off licence ("We always keep a bottle of champagne in the fridge. We never know when someone's going to need it nice and cold for a celebration") culturally cross-referenced with a Turkish photo shop run by a married couple for 50 years.

Site Gallery, Sat to 13 Feb

Robert Clark

Artur Zmijewski, Manchester

The word "challenging" gets overused and misused in art talk, but here, in the work of Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, it is the appropriate term. Through film and video screenings and installations, Zmijewski tackles a series of politically topical and culturally relevant subjects. The recent Democracies (2009) looks into public demonstrations throughout present day Europe, and the alarming Repetition (2005) at the notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment in which volunteers role-played tortured prisoners and their guards. The works, edited and composed to powerful aesthetic as well as intellectual effect, resonate with tensions of political power and individual freedom.

Cornerhouse, to 10 Jan

Robert Clark

Tatsuo Miyajima, London

Creating ocular guides to the galaxy and digital minefields, Japanese sculptor Tatsuo Miyajima is a purveyor of mesmerising electronic installations in which the viewer is often encased in a dark room swimming and flickering with digital numbers. The experience is a bit like being trapped in a vast memory bank. Miyajima originally trained as a painter, but abandoned it for performance art and then light installations, yet he still likes to describe his practice as being similar to oil painting. Since his early technological innovations in the late-80s, Miyajima has become world famous, creating vast LED sculptures. His new exhibition includes his set design commission for the Royal Opera House used in Limen, the new Wayne McGregor ballet.

Lisson Gallery, NW1, Wed to 16 Jan

Jessica Lack

Phil Collins, London

Phil Collins is back, and not a moment too soon for this ex-Turner Prize nominee who has, in the course of his career, through his fascination with community and collective engagement, scrutinised the disquieting and unhealthy world of reality television. To recap, he set up Shady Lane Productions inside Tate Britain during his nomination in 2006 and invited hapless victims of warts'n'all documentaries to tell their stories. He also filmed young Palestinian kids performing in a disco-dance marathon, evoking the American depression-era vogue for such phenomena. But perhaps my favourite work is his ode to Morrissey, in which Colombian fans sing Smiths songs. His new exhibition is inspired by Latin American telenovela, in which a novel is shot like a soap opera. Here, Collins transfers Jean Genet's chilling masterpiece The Maids to Mexico City.

Victoria Miro Gallery, N1, Tue to 18 Dec

Jessica Lack

Barbara Kruger, London

Barbara Kruger needs no introduction. One of a group of feminist artists who shot to fame in the 1980s with her bold, graphic text- based art, Kruger emblazoned billboards with her catchy slogans in red or black blocky typeface. Perhaps most famous was her riff on Tina Turner's song We Don't Need Another Hero, which she illustrated with a picture of a little girl pointing at a boy's muscles. A former magazine editor whose insights are witty and devilishly pertinent, Kruger's art remains a wry social commentary on our media-saturated world. This exhibition displays early monochrome paste-ups, small-scale composites inspired by pop art that present a fascinating study of the artist to come.

Spruth Magers, W1, Sat to 23 Jan

Jessica Lack

Matias Faldbakken, Birmingham

A pile-up of some 24 Marshall guitar amps stands silent, a pole is festooned with discarded video tape. "It's the big production that is all about holding back, about being almost non-productive," the artist says. In his first UK exhibition, titled Shocked Into Abstraction, Norwegian artist Matias Faldbakken presents a series of muted sculptural spectacles. One piece titled Cultural Department (2006) appears to be some kind of Jackson Pollock abstract expressionist painting until it is recognised as a meticulous reproduction of Israeli soldiers' vandalism of the Palestinian Cultural Department in 2002. Throughout, there's an air of subcultural fetishism amid a post-nuclear wasteland. The graffiti and head-banging references are accompanied by a burnt out car. As the artist has observed, rebellion is often fixated by the subject against which it rebels.

Ikon Gallery, Wed to 24 Jan

Robert Clark

Art you can wear from Hermès

The most desirable and grown-up 36 square inches of silk in fashion

Weekend readers' pictures: Green

Your best photographs on this week's theme, from circuit boards to emerald snakes

My Hampshire: an insider's guide

Mushroom expert and supplier Brigitte Tee lists some of the highlights of her adopted county

The Mill at Gordleton

This little gem, near my hometown of Lymington, has been my local for years. It's in a gorgeous position overlooking a river, which is perfect for the summer, and the snug bar inside is cosy in winter. Jean-Christophe Novelli started out and earned his first Michelin star here. Naturally, the pub does fine restaurant food, but I usually pop in for the amazing value bar snacks. One of my favourites is cullen skink, a mixture of smoked haddock, potato and spring onion. There's also a very friendly resident duck.
01590682219, themillatgordleton.co.uk.

Winchester Cathedral

Plenty of people visit Winchster Cathedral on the way to the south coast, but I bet there are many that miss Antony Gormley's stunning sculpture in the Crypt. It's eerily impressive when the crypt floor has flooded, which it has a habit of doing. I'd also highly recommend the guided tower tour, which takes you to the bell chamber and the nave roof, giving way to magnificent views of the city and even to the Isle of Wight if you're lucky.
+44 (0) 01962 857201. Combined entrance and tower tour: £9.

New Forest Show, July

The annual New Forest and Hampshire Country Show is the highlight of my year. It's been going for absolutely donkey's years and it's one of the best agricultural shows in the country. When the show's not on, it's still a lovely place to visit as it's right in the New Forest and red and fallow deer graze here.
The Showground, New Park, Brockenhurst (01590 622400). Adults: £15; children: £7.

Penn Common and Bramshaw Wood Walk

For years I've been walking and horse riding in the New Forest, foraging for wild mushrooms. One of my favourite walks is up in the northeastern corner, near the small village of Bramshaw. It starts at the village pub, the Lamb Inn, in Nomansland and takes you through Penn Common, the place to stop and take stock of the world. The final part goes through woods, past huge oak trees.

• Originally from Germany, Brigitte Tee has lived in Hampshire for over 35 years and founded the supply company Mrs Tee's Wild Mushrooms in 1992.