It started as a cultural movement in Italy in the Late Medieval period and later spread to the rest of Europe. Veronel O'Hannigain Pundit. Why is Donatello's David so important? 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.
Lyla Polvora Teacher. Who modeled for the statue of David? Nikolaos Luthmann Teacher. How was King David? Jonathan and Saul are killed in battle, and David is anointed king over Judah.
With the death of Saul's son, the elders of Israel come to Hebron and David is anointed king over all of Israel. Verania Marroco Teacher. Why did Donatello start sculpting? Although he had worked in Florence for most of his life, in Donatello was summoned to Padua in order to sculpt a funerary monument for the condottiero Erasmo da Narni, who was known as Gattamelata honey-cat.
His equestrian statue was the first of its kind since antiquity. Mawdo Benali Teacher. Where is Donatello's famous bronze statue of David located today? Now in the Bargello Museum, Florence, the statue remains a defining work of Renaissance art by one of the most influential Renaissance sculptors of the age.
The Bargello, also known as Palazzo del Popolo Palace of the People is a former barracks and prison, now an art museum, in Florence, Italy. Galina Gotaran Reviewer. What is Contrapposto in Greek art? Zhe Kutoff Reviewer. How long did it take to sculpt David? Michelangelo was only 26 years old in , but he was already the most famous and best paid artist in his days.
He accepted the challenge with enthusiasm to sculpt a large scale David and worked constantly for over two years to create one of his most breathtaking masterpieces of gleaming white marble. Guillaume Masiero Reviewer. What did the statue of David symbolize for the Florentine republic? David marble statue Michelangelo's David stands nearly 17 feet tall.
Remember that the biblical figure of David was special to the citizens of Florence —he symbolized the liberty and freedom of their republican ideals, which were threatened at various points in the fifteenth century by the Medici family and others. Louanne Stingl Reviewer. Homosexual relations, although proscribed and circumscribed, were nonetheless a pervasive and "centric" mode of behavior, linking individuals normally separated by class and by neighborhood affiliations It occcurred throughout the city, involving men from all walks of life.
Its publicness, even though it is recorded fundamentally through its prosecution, emerges clearly. In fifteenth-century Florence, although defined as "unmentionable" by social critics and theologians, sodomy possessed as irrepressible life of its own.
Not only was it practiced widely and publicly by Florentines, but it produced particular categories of masculinity, structuring "homosocial" relations. The language of prosecution --derived directly from theology-- provides the basis for describing particular male roles within homosexual relations. In an overwhelming majority of cases, such relations involved an older, active partner and an adolescent, passive partner.
Adult males only rarely pursued other adult males; indeed, Rocke asserts that ninety percent of the "passive" partners recorded in court proceedings were eighteen years old or younger, concluding that the "focus of men's homoerotic was on what Florentines called 'fanciulli,' or boys, and we would tend to call adolescents.
Having said that, active sodomy did not represent a threat to a man's masculine identity. His virility, if anything, represented a reinscription of male sexual power. The passive partner was quite differently defined. He was seen as "effeminized" and altered by the act. But even this redefinition did not substantially threaten masculinity, for the passive role was seen as a temporary phase, one the adolescent would quickly shed with maturity.
The cultural gaze produced by the adult and active masculine desire for the passive adolescent male body constituted one important aspect of Florentine homosociality. On the streets of Florence, the male adolescent body was both a compromised site for homoerotic gazing and also an expressive sign, guaranteed effective via its potential innocence and purity.
In early Renaissance Florence a "boy" was himself a sexual drama. To understand how the David embodied this dialectic between desire and its repression, one must take the culture of fifteenth-century Florentine sodomy into account His large hat, perhaps originally adorned with a feather, draws as muc attention to his nudity, as his naked body emphasizes the striking presence of this contemporary headdress.
The inclusion of a hat was an iconographic novelty. Although David was sometimes represented with a garland, the distinctive hat in Donatello's bronze David remarkable. That it is a modern hat would have brought to the fore the performative aspect of the statue, which is today somewhat obscured by historical distance. The hat reminds us that the David represents a quotidian drama, which contemporaries would have recognized. Rocke describes in detail the 'game' of hat stealing, which he calls "a sort of ritual extortion for sex.
After submitting to sex in an alley, Cortigiani got back his hat. On the street a hat on an attractive boy would have drawn attention. It was a signal of potential gratification. The retention of a hat, conversely, transmitted the conservation and reassertion of corporeal and sexual authority. The hat atop the head of the bronze David can be seen to reproduce this ambivalence.
It amplified the "boy's" seductive beauty by coding the adolescent body as desirable. On the other hand, David's garlanded hat, so firmly on his head and beyond the reach of the beholders below, simultaneously functioned to underscore the boy's victory. If one sees the David as embodying the victory of an adolescent boy over the homoerotic gaze, his otherwise iconographically inexplicable hat takes on new significance, symbolizing the boy's retention of honor and dismissal of sexual "attack.
The hat, therefore, might elicit a desirous visuality, but, from the front, David's serious innocence conjoined with his brazen nudity simultaneously would have undermined all lasciviousness. Like the boy-saint Pelagius, who, when fondled by the Caliph of Cordoba, threw off his clothes taunting his persecutor with that which was unattainable, the David seems both to elicit and to dismiss attraction percisely through its nudity.
Paradoxically enticing and dismissive, the boy warrior rose above all heads in the courtyard of the Medici palace. You must be logged in to post a comment. This is a site for information and analysis of the world of the Italian Renaissance. Text is original to this site ItalianRenaissance.
Product links above are affiliate links. David is one of Michelangelo's most-recognizable works, and has become one of the most recognizable statues in the entire world of art. Donatello, David, c. Basic Ideas of the Renaissance.
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