Sculpture – Page 2

Michelangelo, David, 1501-1504, marble. By Rico Heil (User:Silmaril) (private photo) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons — Michelangelo, David, 1501-1504, marble

David is one of Michelangelo’s most-recognizable works, and has become one of the most recognizable statues in the entire world of art. Standing 13’5″ tall, the double life-sized David is depicted patiently waiting for battle, prepped with slingshot in one hand and stone in the other. The twentysomething-Michelangelo carved the David after he had already carved the Pieta in Rome in the late 1490s and returned to Florence in 1501. Knowledge of his talent as a sculptor, therefore, was growing, and his career was accelerating when he was commissioned to carve the biblical David for the outside of the Florence Cathedral. Because the statue was intended to be placed in a high location on the church, it had to be large enough to be seen from below. Today, it resides not outside the cathedral, but inside the comfortable confines of the Accademia Museum in Florence.

The marble block used by Michelangelo was originally excavated for a statue to be carved by another sculptor in 1464, but the block was not fully carved. When Michelangelo received his commission in 1501, he was presented with the challenge of using the block which had already been worked upon to some degree. He had to work with what he was given, and in this case it meant that the figure he carved would not project outward beyond the preset block of marble.

The David we are presented with here is a nude man with a very muscular physique. His veins are visible in his arms and hands as he clutches the stones with one hand and the slingshot in the other. His hands and his head appear to be disproportionally large for his body, possibly because they were deemed more visually important for viewers who would see the statue high up on the exterior of the cathedral. Also, his left leg, which straddles the rocky base upon which he stands, appears a big too long for his body. It accentuates the line of this leg as it forms an essential component in David’s contrapposto stance. Like the ancient Hellenistic and Roman sculptures who were masters at convincingly depicting the human anatomy, Michelangelo has depicted David so that his body responds to the stance he is in. David’s weight has been placed on his right leg while his left leg is at rest. Because of this, his hips have shifted with one side being higher than the other. In turn, this has caused David’s spine and midsection to curve slightly, and his right shoulder drops slightly below his left one.

Compared to Donatello’s bronze David, also created in Florence – though a half century earlier – we see several tantalizing similarities and differences. Both are heroic nudes standing in contrapposto, though Donatello dressed his figure in boots and a hat. Unlike the semi-effeminate boy that Donatello created, Michelangelo presented David as a strong and assured man stripped of all the other objects associated with the biblical narrative, such as the head of Goliath or the sword. Instead, David stands alone with only his slingshot and stones almost hidden on his person. Scale is also an important consideration, since Donatello’s David is less than half the height of Michelangelo’s. In fact, Michelangelo presents us with David in giant form, which is ironic since his enemy is a giant. The colossal size is significant because it was the first time that a large scale nude statue was made in the Renaissance since antiquity. But perhaps even more striking is the timing in the narrative at which we are seeing David as depicted by Donatello and Michelangelo. The earlier sculptor shows us David after the fight has already occurred and after he is victorious in battle. Not so with the latter. Instead, Michelangelo shows us David before he is engaged in battle, and before victory has been attained. This anticipation of action is manifested in the face of Michelangelo’s David, which conveys intense concentration and a furrowed brow as he stares into the distance. This is a figure who is focused on the future rather than one who is contemplating the past.

David-Michelangelo-detail — Detail of the face of Michelangelo’s David.

After it was completed, Michelangelo’s David became a civic symbol for Florence, even though it was ultimately a religious sculpture. The early 1500s was a time of turbulence between the city and its former ruling family, the Medici. Now, the Medici were seen as aggressors or tyrants and had been kicked out of Florence. Florentines adopted the David as a symbol of their own struggle against the Medici, and in 1504 they decided that Michelangelo’s creation was too good to place high up on the cathedral. Instead, they put it in a much more accessible place near the Palazzo della Signoria, the main square of the city.

Perhaps Donatello’s landmark work – and one of the greatest sculptural works of the early Renaissance – was his bronze statue of David. This work signals the return of the nude sculpture in the round figure, and because it was the first such work like this in over a thousand years, it is one of the most important works in the history of western art.

The work was commissioned by Cosimo de’Medici for the Palazzo Medici, but we do not know when during the mid-fifteenth century Donatello cast it. It was originally placed on top of a pedestal in the center of the courtyard in the Palazzo Medici, so the viewer would be looking up at it from below (unlike the view we typically get of it in photographs).

David is shown at a triumphal moment within the biblical storyline of his battle with the Philistine, Goliath. According to the account, after David struck Goliath with the stone from his slingshot, he cut off his head with Goliath’s sword. Here, we see the aftermath of this event as David stands in a contemplative pose with one foot atop his enemy’s severed head. David wears nothing but boots and a shepherd’s hat with laurel leaves on top of it, which may allude to his victory or to his role as a poet and musician.

Before Donatello’s work, David was typically depicted as a king, given his status in the Old Testament. Here, however, we have a stark change in the way David is depicted. Not only is he shown in the nude, but he’s also a youth. In Middle Ages, nudity was not used in art except in certain moral contexts, such as the depiction of Adam and Eve, or the sending of souls off to hell. In the classical world, nudity was often used in a different, majestic context, such as with figures who were gods, heroes, or athletes. Here, Donatello seems to be calling to mind the type of heroic nudity of antiquity, since David is depicted at triumphal point in the biblical narrative of his victory over Goliath.

As for David’s youthfulness, Donatello has gone back to the early life of the biblical David to depict him, rather than to his later life as a king. It seems that Donatello is trying to associate David’s youth with an innocent and virtuous life. David looks young here – so young, in fact, that his muscles have barely developed enough to hold the large sword – that his victory over his foe is all the more improbable. Could David’s victory have been gained without divine intervention? Donatello’s work seems to imply that the answer is “no” – the victory was God’s rather than man’s.

In any case, Donatello’s David is a classic work of Renaissance sculpture, given its Judaeo-Christian subject matter modeled on a classical sculptural type. It was revolutionary for its day – so much so that it did not get copied right away. The idea of the life-sized nude sculpture-in-the-round evidently took some time to sink in and become an acceptable statue type.

Michelangelo’s David

Further Reading

Donatello’s David

Further reading