David

In the same span of years as the mythological inventions and the profitable protection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the young Bernini carved this dynamic figure of a young warrior-shepherd, and in this biblical character too he did not depart in the least from the concerns that informed the Ovidian fables. As if to underline more forcefully his own passionate participation in the programmatic renewal of sculptural forms, in clear opposition to the Renaissance legacy, both Michelangelesque and Mannerist, he chose to give the young hero's face his own features, in a violent but not rhetorical pose. The painful twist of the hero, at the climax of the dramatic action (how different from the ephebes of Donatello and Verrocchio, serene in victory!), marks the new canon of the Baroque statue, which remained valid and was imitated practically up to the years of Canova.