(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)