'Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance' (V and A until June 30 2023): Emotional Relief

Lamentation, c.1455-60, V and A

There was always going to be disappointment: a Donatello exhibition without any of the big bangs. No Judith, no bronze David, no St Mark, no Zuccone, no Mary Magdalene. And the V and A does itself no favours by having the biggest bang they've got as the first thing you see. The marble David, Donatello's first major commission, often feels like the boring, fully clothed brother of that famous saucy nude, but here its clean beauty has space to breathe. The deep veining of the marble pulses like veins on the skin, the human details of puckered cloth creates intimacy, the over-long neck and small head make him impossibly young and yet undeniably noble. And the curators have an extra trick, a cut-through arch to the end of the show and an almost but not quite mirror-image of the David, time- and restoration-ravaged. You don't fully appreciate the cleverness until the end.

It is the staging of the exhibition which really elevates it. The open space of the Sainsbury Gallery retains an airiness, with long vistas across to the big pieces and shadowy alcoves for the drawings; the deep, calm aquamarine is a perfect foil to marble, bronze and gold; the lines are clean, the captioning just short of twee (there were a few too many 'charmings' for my taste). And the lighting is superb: the poignancy of the shadow cast by the tattered drapery on the bronze crucifixion catches in your throat. There is so much to admire that it seems churlish to dwell on the absences. There is a genuine, but not entirely successful, attempt to explain the processes: the curators seem overly concerned with Donatello's training as a goldsmith, and his skill as a draughtsman - tricky to illustrate when neither gold-work nor drawings survive. There is little sense of his career and stylistic development. Too little attention is paid to his skill as a stone carver, or his technical development of bronze casting, and his exploitation of wood is absent. Instead we get a lot of terracotta; a lot of 'after', 'studio of' and 'attributed to'. Sometimes it feels as if he is being reduced to a producer of putti and churned out Virgin and Childs.

Pazzi Madonna, c.1420, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

I'm being picky. What you do get is some of the most beautiful, affecting and virtuosic sculpture that was ever made. The Pazzi Madonna, so softly carved out of crisp marble, literally brought tears to my eyes. The noses of mother and child almost desperately press against each other, separated by a shadow which seems like a wound; Christ's tiny clutching hand and almost laughing open mouth, contrast with the downcast sorrow of her premonition. The Miracle of the Mule (c.1446-50), usually half unnoticed in the Basilica of S. Antonio in Padua, is so complex, so clever, that you can look at it for hours. Donatello's ability to work in ultra-shallow riliveo schiacciato is easy to take for granted: mathematical perspective, straightforward to accomplish with drawn orthogonals on paper, is skewed by even the most shallow relief. Here Donatello juggles perspective, multiple figures, emotional range and a complex triple-arch composition which you can see caught Mantegna's eye. The whole surface is alive with texture, light and reflection. For me, though, the absolute highlight is the late Lamentation, a rough hewn slab of raw emotion. Mary's haggard grief is reminiscent of the wooden Penitent Magdalene. Snaking drapery, hair and limbs create an inverted bacchanale of despair that dissolves time - quattrocento could be the early twentieth century.

The exhibition ends with a slightly pointless section on 'Donatello's legacy' which allows the V and A to show their 19th century copy of the bronze David (1440), but surprisingly not their Judith and Holofernes (c.1455). It emphasises the show's weakness at presenting the big picture: those two copies summarise his range, and his real legacy can be seen, not in trite tributes, but in Rodin, in Kollwitz. You leave with a very good sense of Donatello's relationship with Michelozzo; of the studio system which operated in the early Renaissance; of the importance of Padua as an artistic centre. But you have very little sense of Donatello as a man (which could be deliberate); of his ability to create emotional and psychological insight; of his versatility, or indeed of his artistic influence. In this sense it's an exhibition for the enthusiast and the scholar, rather than the general public, which seems a great shame.