Today is the Sunday before St George’s Day (April 23) so this week’s work of art is a justly celebrated marble sculpture of St George, carved by the Florentine Renaissance master Donatello in about 1415-16. The work was originally designed to occupy a gabled niche on the exterior of Orsanmichele, the official church of Florence’s trade guilds, which competed with one another to comission the most splendid works of art, both to their own and to their city’s greater glory. The St George was commissioned and paid for by the guild of armourers. An appropriately military saint, embodying the Christian virtues of the active rather than the contemplative life, the figure would originally have been armed with either a real sword or, more probably, a lance, of finest Florentine manufacture – an early instance of product placement. Due to the levels of air pollution in modern Florence the statue was moved indoors some years ago and may now be seen in the Bargello Museum.
The life and adventures of St George are recounted in the medieval miscellany of saints’ lives, The Golden Legend. His most famous feat was the rescue of the daughter of the king of Silena, a city in the province of Libya plagued by “a pestilential dragon”. To placate the beast, this fair maiden had been offered up as a sacrifice, but to her good fortune St George happened to be passing at the time. He rode forth to meet the dragon as it arrived for its dinner, crippled it with a blow from his lance, and subsequently converted the grateful population of Silena to Christianity.
Donatello depicted the climactic slaying of the dragon in a bas-relief set into the base of his statue. The life-size figure of the saint, however, seems caught up...
