Date: 18-04-2004
Owning Institution: The Bargello
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: Renaissance        

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 in an earlier point in the narrative. His brow is knitted and he seems to glance with sudden anxiety to his left. The shallowness of the allotted niche on the front of Orsanmichele gave Donatello very little room to contrive a dramatic pose. So the saint had to be shown standing, weight fairly evenly distributed on both feet, facing out towards the viewer. But even working within this narrow compass, the sculptor has managed to convey strong emotion and coiled energy. St George’s powerful torso twists and tenses, slightly but unmistakably, as if in anticipation of danger. He seems at once troubled, alert and determined – the epitome of virtuous Christian youth.

Florentine humanist authors of the fifteenth century wrote much about the importance of educating and setting a good example to the city’s young men. Adolescents, then as now, were regarded as a potentially troublesome social grouping; and street brawls between gangs of aimless young men were common, to judge by the complaints of the social commentators of the time. So Donatello’s St George was among other things an exemplum virtutis, a reproof to the yob element of Florentine society. But the sculpture was also part of a broad and urgent attempt to fashion a sense of civic identity under which all Florentine citizens might rally.

Apart from Venice, with its impregnable sea defences, Florence was the only republic in early Renaissance Italy to have resisted rule by despotism. Despite the wealth of its merchants and its bankers –to a certain extent because of that very wealth – the city’s independence was constantly under threat. Throughout the early fifteenth century the Milanese, under the rule of the rapacious Visconti family, attempted to conquer and annex Florence and on more than one occasion very nearly succeeded. Two successive Florentine chancellors, Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni, formulated a propagandistic counterblast to the threat of Milan. Inspired by their reading of classical authors such as Cicero, they constructed a civic ideology for Florence based on the model of virtuous republican Rome. It was Donatello’s great achievement to translate that ideology into the forms of art. Whereas Salutati and Bruni had drawn on classical literature to paint a rousing picture of the ideal republican city, standing firm against its autocratic enemies, he drew on the language of classical sculpture. He revived the naturalism of antique art and also breathed new life into the ancient Roman cult of the military hero. In the sense that the term “Renaissance” implies a conscious attempt to revive the forms and beliefs of the classical world, Donatello deserves to be considered the first truly Renaissance artist.

Donatello’s St George is, of course, a representation of a Christian saint, but one infused with the energies, and possessed of the physical perfection, of the classical hero. In that sense it functioned as an ideal role model for early fifteenth-century Florentines, devout Christians who had been urged by their leaders to see themselves, simultaneously, as proud freeborn heirs to the traditions of republican Rome. The carving is masterly, perhaps most evidently in the treatment of the hands and the wrists and the forearms enclosed in chain mail – few sculptors have ever been able to handle the transition between marble as flesh, and marble as metal, quite so convincingly. But what struck Donatello’s contemporaries and followers most forcibly was the compelling physical and psychological realism of the figure, the way in which the saint seems capable not merely of movement, but also to be rapt in the motions and turmoil of his own thought. In the words of Giorgio Vasari, “the head shows the beauty of youth, the brave spirit of the warrior, a true-to-life quality terrifying in its fierceness, and a marvellous sense of movement within the stone.” Because so many subsequent artists followed in the path of Donatello, the extreme originality of his work is not now easily appreciated. But by animating the human figure in sculpture, and by deepening and enriching its psychology, he profoundly altered the course of Western art.