David

In this statue Donatello seems to participate fully in the most advanced figurative culture of the moment, which sought to translate the classical repertoire into formal modes of ostentatious Gothic rhythm, and at the same time to fuse those opposing elements into a naturalistic image. But the whole highly cultivated formal conception of the work, from the classical quotation of the hero’s head to the elaborate Gothic rhythm of the drapery, from the virtuosity of the mimetic rendering of flesh and fabric to the frank immediacy of a luministic modelling, is fused and surpassed in the vital truth of the “gesture” caught from life. Classicism and Gothicism thus remain superstructures, while the realistic impetus that determines the statue’s conception asserts itself as its poetic core.