My favorite Renaissance artwork mentioned in the episode is a bronze statue of David, sculpted by Donatello (1430s). Among Donatello’s creations, the bronze half-meter statue of the young David is particularly remarkable. It is the first image of a free-standing naked human body in Renaissance sculpture. David’s figure was created in the most classical period of the master’s work and has several peculiar features characteristic of the Renaissance.
The theme of the statue and the specifics of the image and perception of the human body portrayed through it are very characteristic of the Renaissance. First, the hero-winner theme is a typical one because it is a popular theme of the Renaissance. One of the most widely heroized images of the Italian Renaissance is the biblical shepherd, the conqueror of the giant Goliath and later the most famous king of Israel. The innovation of Donatello’s style in comparison with the ancient sculpture is shown in the following features. The ancient sculpture was a self-image, a sense of human body; it lacked the main feature of the Renaissance – the importance of space. Antiquity only depicts a body while the Renaissance portrays a body in space. In David’s closed silhouette, there is a sense of such sharpness and tension that the profound difference between this work and more harmonious antique models is apparent.
In such a creative solution, the understanding of the human personality, the power over one’s destiny, was manifested, which was not the case in antiquity. After Donatello’s David, the nude figure became an integral part of the new humanistic art. Donatello embodied a bold impulse, dynamism, and spirituality in this statue, more than in his earlier and later works. This figure completes the period of laying the foundations of the Renaissance and marks the beginning of a new era in Italian art history.