David

More than twenty years after the “David” made for S. Maria del Fiore – probably on his return from the journey to Rome in 1432 – Donatello took up the theme again in the bronze modelled for the Medici house. The different cultural moment and the private destination of the work explain the completely different interpretation, in both iconography and style, that the artist gave to the biblical subject, this time the starting point for a reading of classical models in a key of humanist symbolism, by way of refined and esoteric allusions. But even now the cultural and formal apparatus deriving from cultivated Florentine circles is overcome by the overwhelming reality of the physical and sensual evidence of the adolescent body.