Reading into the narratives of unfinished art

“Art is never finished, only abandoned,” said Leonardo da Vinci.
The Renaissance boasts many masterpieces that were left unfinished by their creators. Notable examples are Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà, Albrecht Dürer’s Salvator Mundi and quite a number in da Vinci’s oeuvre, a notable example being The Adoration of the Magi. 
The term non-finito originally referred to sculpture, Donatello being generally considered to have pioneered the ‘technique’. Giorgio Vasari, in his seminal Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, claims that Donatello, in his old age, was afflicted with disease and loneliness, hardly the ideal conditions conducive to finishing works of art.
Blah Blah Blah by Debbie Caruana Dingli
However, the Florentine sculptor tried to defy the odds of his predicament and accepted the commissions for the construction of the Pulpit of the Passion and the Pulpit of the Resurrection for the church of San Lorenzo, in Florence. These two works are charged with heightened spiritual emotion, which was a characteristic of the sculptor’s last phase. 

Non-finito can be encountered in subsequent eras of art history – from Rembrandt to Manet to Matisse and...