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Course: Europe 1300 - 1800 > Unit 3
Lesson 2: Sculpture and architecture in central Italy- Brunelleschi & Ghiberti, the Sacrifice of Isaac
- Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, Sacrifice of Isaac (quiz)
- Ghiberti, "Gates of Paradise," east doors of the Florence Baptistery
- Brunelleschi, Old Sacristy
- Brunelleschi, Dome of the Cathedral of Florence.
- Brunelleschi, Dome (quiz)
- Brunelleschi, Pazzi Chapel
- Brunelleschi, Pazzi Chapel
- Brunelleschi, Santo Spirito
- Nanni di Banco, Four Crowned Saints
- Orsanmichele and Donatello's Saint Mark
- Donatello, Saint Mark
- Donatello, St. Mark (quiz)
- A soldier saint in Renaissance Florence: Donatello's St George
- Donatello, Feast of Herod
- Donatello, Madonna of the Clouds
- Donatello, David
- Donatello, David
- Donatello, David (quiz)
- Donatello, The Miracle of the Mule
- Donatello, Equestrian Monument of Gattamelata
- Donatello, Mary Magdalene
- Andrea della Robbia’s bambini at the Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence
- Alberti, Palazzo Rucellai
- Alberti, Palazzo Rucellai
- Alberti, Palazzo Rucellai
- Alberti, Façade of Santa Maria Novella, Florence
- Alberti, Sant'Andrea in Mantua
- Michelozzo, Palazzo Medici
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A soldier saint in Renaissance Florence: Donatello's St George
A conversation with Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker in front of Donatello, Saint George, c. 1416-17, marble, 214 cm high (Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, commissioned by the armorers and sword makers guild for the exterior of Orsanmichele). Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Video transcript
(upbeat piano music) - [Steven] We're in the
Bargello, in Florence looking up at Donatello's Saint George. - [Beth] Saint George
was a Christian solider who saved a town by killing
a dragon after 15,000 townspeople converted to Christianity. - [Steven] Now this Saint
George was not originally here. This was on the exterior
of a building just a few blocks away called Orsanmichele. - [Beth] Orsanmichele is an
incredibly important building when we think about the beginnings of the Renaissance in Florence. It's there that we find the
first truly Renaissance style sculptures, many of the guilds
of Florence were responsible for commissioning their
patron saint for a niche on the outside of Orsanmichele. - [Steven] Guilds were
collectives that were formed out of skilled occupations. - [Beth] Like unions today. But they were very powerful in Florence and often took part in
the building campaigns, the efforts to embellish
the city in the 14th and 15th century. The guild of armorers and
sword makers commissioned Donatello to sculpt Saint
George, their patron saint. - [Steven] Florence was
fairly unique in that it was a republic. And it was a growing sense of civic pride, pride in one's city, pride
in one's historical roots which the Florentines
believed were ancient Roman. So this is a sculpture
that was made for the city, but it was paid for by
the guild of armorers and sword makers and so it's no surprise that we see a shield
and a hand that probably originally held some sort of blade. - [Beth] There are drill marks
on his head that indicate he also likely wore a helmet
or wreath of some sort also made out of metal. - [Steven] And so this
can be seen a little bit as an advertisement. - [Beth] It's really important
to understand this moment of intense civic pride, but
one where there's no real distinction between the
religions spiritual aspects of the people of the city and
the government of the city. These were often joined in
the great civic projects that took place in Florence in
the 14th and 15th centuries. - [Steven] Well, it's like Orsanmichele had several purposes. It was a church, but it was
also a granary that helped to feed the city. - [Beth] So this idea that the secular and the spiritual coming together. - [Steven] This sculpture
was for the outside, so this was public art. This was art that you passed as you walked along the streets. So many sculptures at
Orsanmichele and in other parts of early Renaissance
Florence depict figures at this scale as old, wizened prophets. But here we have such a youthful figure, who's a pillar of strength
and determination. - [Beth] He is a solider
saint and that's so clear when we look at him. In his pose of his body,
this sense of facing the future with his left
hand coming across his body, his left foot forward,
he seems to be moving out of that niche. It's not quite what we
would call contrapposto, that is the classical
representation of a figure whose body shifts as he
bears his weight on one leg. Here, the weight is on
both legs but his left hip juts forward and that does
create this wonderfully subtle sense of movement and
the potential for action. Look at the diagonal of
the right bottom quadrant of the shield and the way
that it echoes the line of his right leg. And that line is picked up
past his hip by the cloak that comes from behind him. - [Beth] And although the
figure is fully clothed and wearing armor, we still have a sense of
a body underneath there and we can see Donatello's
understanding of human anatomy, we can see the ligaments in
his neck and his collarbone. - [Steven] But mostly what I
see, is Saint George himself looking out above us, looking
to his, and his city's future. - [Beth] His body seems
to speak of bravery, but if you look closely at this face, his eyebrows are knit
together, there are wrinkles in his forehead, and there's
a real sense of anxiety and uncertainty about what's
to come and so you feel this figure marshaling his courage to face the fierce dragon. - [Steven] Like so many of
Donatello's best sculptures, this is an expression of
the outward physical form, but it's also portrait of the interior, of the psychological, of the emotional. - [Beth] This is a figure
who is fully human. We've left behind the
elongated, expressionless transcendent figures from
the early Gothic period and we have a figure here
who has emotional depth that is really something that Donatello and the early Renaissance is known for. When we think about
freestanding sculpture, we often think about
sculpture, we often think about sculpture that we can walk
around, and this is made fro a niche, so Donatello
knew that we were never to see his back, and
yet there is the sense that he could walk away. And this independence
from the architecture, this movement toward
freestanding sculpture is an important development in
early Renaissance sculpture. But it's not only in the
figure of Saint George that Donatello is so
inventive, we have to look too at the way that he
utilized the entire niche. In the lower leaf sculpture
below we see a princess, a woman observing Saint
George slaying the dragon. - [Steven] She stands on the right, the figure of Saint George
on horseback and the dragon are in the middle and on the left, a cave. - [Beth] What Donatello
is doing here is bringing the kind of inventiveness
that we see in painting in the early Renaissance,
creating an illusion of space to relief sculpture. - [Steven] We can see
that in the very levels of the depth of the carving,
Saint George, his horse, the dragon and the
female figure are carved in relatively high relief whereas the cave and this wonderful receding
colonnade on the right are carved in low relief so
that there's a distinction that's built in. It begins to create the variety of form that is an equivalent to
the complexity of painting. - [Beth] It's almost
atmospheric perspective. In addition to the colonnade on the right, there are trees and a sense of a landscape in the background where the
carving is even shallower and incised into the stone. This is an entirely new way of thinking about relief sculpture. Where before we had a flat
background with figures that emerged from there,
here Donatello is thinking about that background of
the sculpture as a surface for creating an illusion of space. And this technique is
called rilievo stiacciato. - [Steven] When I look at that
female figure I'm reminded of ancient Greek maenads. - [Beth] The artist of the
early Renaissance are looking back to the naturalistic art
of ancient Greece and Rome. - [Steven] And Donatello
was actively trying to study the art of antiquity. It's entirely possible
that there was in fact a relief carving of a
maenad that he would have been able to see. - [Beth] Look at that female figure. She stands in lovely
contrapposto, her clothing clings to her body just the way it
would on an ancient Greek or Roman sculpture. - [Steven] But I think
it's important for us to go a step further
and to think about why classicism was important to Donatello. Why it was important to artists in the early 15th century in Florence. - [Beth] Well, there's a new
emphasis on the pleasures of this world. Sometimes we think about
this as part of the humanism of the Renaissance. This interest in the secular world. - [Steven] And the ancient
Greeks and the ancient Romans were unparalleled in their
observation of the human body, of the natural world and
their ability to replicate it. Framing that central
relief, we have two shields with the emblems of the armorers' guild. You can see as sword, you can see armor, a reminder of who paid for this, a reminder that this functions
both as an expression of a city but also of the
place of the armors within it, and a reminder to us
of the deep civic pride that existed in Florence
in the 15th century. (upbeat piano music)