ROCKY S ITALY Florence Donatello s St George

The sculpture that you see up there behind me represents the figure of Saint George. It was carved by Donatello around the year 1417 for the Sword and Armor Guild of Florence. In fact, before being moved here to the Bargello, this statue was once on one of the more famous churches of Florence, which is called Or San Michele. And in fact, if you're in Florence and you happen to walk by the church, walk around until you find the copy of Saint George and its niche on the outside of that building. In fact, when Donatello was hired to carve this statue, he found a rather difficult situation. Because of the 14 niches on that church, this was the most shallow. And the reason was because there was a staircase running up behind it. So technically, Donatello had limited space in which to accommodate a sculpture. And the logical solution would have been to make the sculpture smaller. But making it smaller would have made the guild look less important, right? Size is perhaps the most simple form of hierarchy. So Donatello had to find another solution. And a solution here for Saint George was ingenious. Is Donatello's Saint George standing in contrapposto? Yes, right? You can see that the parts of his body are in fact in opposition to each other. But the question is, which of those limbs is bearing all the weight? Well, Saint George is not standing in your classical contrapposto, right? It looks as if that weight is almost evenly distributed between both legs. It's what I like to call ski jumper contrapposto, right? He looks like Eddie the Eagle soaring through the air. And what this does is essentially to kind of propel the sculpture forward, right? In this rather aggressive stance. Now, what is George wearing? He's wearing Roman armor. And that armor is actually incomplete because if you look at the top of George's forehead, you can see this little hole there where once upon a time there was a bronze helmet fixed onto the head of Saint George. And on his waist, there is another hole where there was once a bronze belt wrapped around, supporting a bronze sheath that was once on George's left leg. And want to take a wild guess as to what George was holding in that right hand? A drawn sword. So we have a figure standing in an aggressive stance. He's wearing armor. He has a drawn weapon in his hand. And if we look carefully at that face of George now, these words will echo again quite soon. The furrowed brow of Saint George. Those fixed, focused eyes of George. The flared nostrils. The puckered mouth. The tense neck, right? In other words, what Donatello has done is transformed a limitation or disadvantage in that shallow niche in which he's working into an advantage because he is the first to actually depict the statue now in a narrative context. In other words, this is not just George standing there outside of time and space as most sculptures do, but this is George at the very climax of the story where he has ridden out to meet the dragon head-on in combat, and so the idea that essentially we have George up top ready to fight the dragon and then George down below in the relief sculpture instead slaying that dragon. Now this sculpture is tremendously important in its own right for being the first to place a figure in a narrative context, but the way I like to describe it as well is that if we take George, triple him in size, strip him completely, put him in the gym for about 100 years, and replace that sword with a stone, you're looking at the direct source of iconographic inspiration for Michelangelo's debut.