Heroics

Michelangelo (1475 - 1564) was not the first artist to sculpt a nude David during the Renaissance. That honor belongs to Donatello (c. 1386 – 1466), whose bronze David was the first stand-alone nude male sculpted since antiquity. You may not be familiar with Donatello, but he was the quintessential early renaissance artist and laid the groundwork for the later Michelangelo (among many).

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Donatello's David, which I saw yesterday in Florence's Bargello Museum, is shocking when you consider it was made barely out of the middle ages when art was mostly a means for the Catholic Church to portray its great stories. It is an effeminate nude adolescent boy, standing with a cocked hip and one foot on the severed head of Goliath, a sword in one hand, his other holding a stone, and on his flowing locks is a girly hat with garlands and ribbons.

But it is was also Donatello's St. George, commissioned for the sword makers guild, that must have been an inspiration for the determined, but vulnerable expression of Michelangelo's heroic nude David.