The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Donatello · a nude boy standing over the severed head of Goliath, cast in bronze, in the round, about 158 cm high, with traces of gilding · made at a date the scholarship has not settled, proposals running from the early 1430s to the 1450s · on a column in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici, Florence, by 1469, taken to the Palazzo della Signoria after the Medici were expelled in 1494, and in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, since the nineteenth century · scored as the one cast figure with Goliath’s head and its integral base, whole as cast; the lost pedestal and column, the gilding now reduced to traces and the altered patina bear on its survival only
Mode
A freestanding nude in bronze, a biblical hero shown after the act; triumph turned inward, the statue taken out of the niche
Mythos
The small defeating the great, carried by the object itself: the boy stands on the giant; David and Mercury overlapping in the costume; the small republic against the tyrant
Phase
Made at a date unsettled between the early 1430s and the 1450s; in the Medici courtyard by 1469; at the seat of government after 1494; in the Bargello since the nineteenth century
Presentation
Cast bronze in the round, about 158 cm, one figure with the giant’s head on an integral base; first raised on a column, now lost, and now seen at the level of a museum floor
Register
A cool, uncanny beauty at one temperature: polished skin against chased hair and beard, a withdrawn face, the terror of a beheading set aside
Scale
One boy, one act completed, one weight held
Governing Proposition
A boy stands naked but for a brimmed hat crowned with a wreath and a pair of boots, a sword too large for him grounded in his right hand, a stone in his left hand, which rests on his hip, and his left foot on the severed head of the giant he has killed. He does not exult; he looks down, under the brim, at nothing in particular. The wager of the bronze is that victory can be shown as an aftermath and an inwardness, that the weak remain weak in body after they have overcome the strong, and that an unclothed body, made to be walked round, can carry the meaning of a sacred story and of a city.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Donatello, Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, was born about 1386 and died in 1466. When he made the bronze David is not settled, and the uncertainty belongs to the scholarship, not only to this page: proposals run from the early 1430s to the 1450s, and about 1440 is the figure most handbooks give. For whom he made it is open in the same way. What is firm is where it stood by 1469: on a column in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici in Florence, a family’s house, raised above the heads of those who crossed the court.
The figure is about 158 cm high, under life size for a grown man and about right for the adolescent it shows. A boy stands nude but for a brimmed hat crowned with a wreath and a pair of boots. In his right hand he holds a long sword, point down; in his left, which rests on his hip, a stone. Under his raised left foot lies the bearded, helmeted head of Goliath, and from the helmet a long feather or wing rises along the inside of the boy’s right leg nearly to the groin. A wreath of foliage runs round the base. The bronze keeps traces of the gilding it once carried.
The work scored here is that one cast figure, the head and the integral base included. The first pedestal and its column are lost, and with them the height from which the figure was meant to be seen. The courtyard in which it first stood is context. So is Donatello’s earlier marble David of 1408 to 1409, clothed, which now stands in the same museum as the bronze: the same subject by the same hand, some three decades before, and the best measure of how far the second one went.
Movement II
The face is the work’s withholding. It looks down, under the brim, half in shadow, at nothing in particular, and from no side does it meet the viewer’s. On its column it was set above the eye, so that the downward gaze fell toward those below and not upon them; in the museum, at a lower height, the face still refuses the exchange. The hat and its wreath do much of this work. They shadow the face and turn the victory inward.
Victory here is an aftermath. The boy does not exult, address or display. The sword is grounded; the hand with the stone rests on the hip. The stone is the cause, and the sword, too large for him, only the sequel, so that the disproportion of blade to body tells the story in one object: a child has done what he could not have done by force, and remains a child in body after the act. The weak overcome the strong and stay weak. And the unclothed body, neither athlete nor god, is shown as sufficient to bear a sacred and a civic meaning, which is what the image claims for the nude.
That much can be stated, and it holds. What cannot be stated as one condition is the rest. The bronze has been read as a civic emblem, as a private delight, as a religious figure, and as an erotic one, and the feather makes the last reading hard to set aside. It discloses more than it settles, and part of what is read in it is brought to it. Its elevation is of the same kind: a cool and uncanny beauty at one temperature, under life size and still, the terror of a beheading set aside by design. It rises from several sides as the viewer walks round it, and it does not rise higher.
Movement III
The work is a relation: a weight resting on a weight, the living foot on the dead face. Neither the boy nor the head could go without the other going too. The oldest of reversals, the small defeating the great, is carried here by the object and not by allusion, since the boy literally stands on the giant and a large head lies under a small foot. The smooth living foot rests on a bearded face whose eyes are not quite closed.
Take the two faces, the most distant elements in the work. The living boy’s at the top is turned down and withdrawn under its brim; the dead giant’s at the bottom is turned down too, half lidded, outside any exchange. They are the same metal, finished by the same hand, the one polished and the other chased. The sword’s weight answers the stone’s lightness, the hat’s brim the helmet’s, the feather the leg. Nothing in the figure breaks this law. Its range is narrow in kind, two bodies, youth and age, victor and victim, in one quiet register, and the law governs that range wholly.
The modelling is of an adolescent body, neither athletic nor antique in proportion: the soft belly, the thin arms, the weight thrown into one hip, anatomically specific in a way no figure of its century matches. The finish is graded to meaning, skin polished, hair, wreath and beard chased and textured, the feather drawn thin, the boots tooled, and the cast is ambitious, a slender figure with an extended arm and a long blade. The boots and the wreath at the base are worked with less attention than the body. The small relief on Goliath’s helmet is fine and cannot be read at viewing distance; the figure would not miss it.
Movement IV
The feather is the boldest part and the most argued. It rises from the giant’s helmet along the inside of the boy’s right leg nearly to the groin, and it is, besides the foot, the one place where giant and boy touch. It was modelled and cast deliberately, and it runs the length of the inner leg. Whatever it means, it is not idle. It is also where the form leaves its meaning open, for it makes the beauty disturbing and the eros explicit, and the work does not say to what end.
The inheritance was the clothed David of the Florentine tradition, Donatello’s own marble among it; the statue in the niche, made to be seen from the front and bound to a building; and a long reserve toward the nude, admitted for Adam and Eve, the damned and the body of Christ. The bronze is a freestanding figure in the round, nude, raised on a column to be walked round, a biblical hero made a naked adolescent in the pose of an antique god. Its costume carries a second figure: the brimmed hat and the boots recall Mercury, and whether the boy is David, Mercury or both has long been argued. Antiquity supplied the model to which the turn returned. The turn was still real, and the unease it carried has outlived its maker.
In any other form most of this would go. In relief or in a niche the body would be a picture of a body; freestanding, it has a back, a side and a weight on one leg. In marble the skin would lose the metal’s lustre against the chased hair and beard, which is how the work separates the living from the dead. At heroic scale the boy would cease to be a boy. The questions the form leaves open have lasted more than five centuries: when it was made and for whom, Cosimo de’ Medici, an earlier commission or a civic one; whose eros it is, the maker’s, the patron’s, the courtyard’s or the modern reader’s; whether the face is withdrawn, smug, dreaming or grieving. The literature has turned from style and dating to politics and to the history of sexuality, and the bronze has sustained each turn.
Movement V
After the expulsion of the Medici in 1494 the figure was taken from their courtyard to the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of the government. The same bronze, read first as a private delight, was read there as a civic warning: the small republic against the tyrant. The single figure holds the sacred, the state, the body, desire, death, antiquity and art, and youth against age, and the pose integrates them, one boy, one act completed, one weight held. It does not hold labour, the family, history beyond the story or any consciousness but one, closed and unreadable.
Its pressure on what followed came through answers. Verrocchio’s bronze David for the Medici answered it directly. Michelangelo’s marble David answered it at colossal scale and made the subject the emblem of the republic; Cellini’s Perseus in the Loggia stands on Medusa’s head in the same pattern of victor over a severed head; the small bronze and the collector’s nude followed, and through them the nude became the central subject of European sculpture. The figure stood in a family courtyard before it stood in public, and its fame has been partly eclipsed by Michelangelo’s. It has been in Florence throughout and in the Bargello since the nineteenth century, whole as cast. The column is lost and the gilding reduced to traces, so the play of gold on dark bronze the maker intended is now inferred rather than seen.
The desk sets it below Michelangelo’s David at 9.2, in Tier V, whose scale, civic installation and reach are larger; a tenth below the Pietà and Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa at 8.9, which rise higher; level with Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library at 8.8, another Medici work in the same city; and above the Laocoön at 8.6 and Rodin’s The Thinker at 8.3. Every condition of the summit holds, and only the sum withholds it. The boy stands with the sword grounded and the stone kept, his foot on the face of the man he has killed, looking down at nothing, and from no side does he look back.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, part by part. The boy cannot go, nor the head: the work is the relation between them, a weight resting on a weight, the living foot on the dead face. The sword cannot go; it is too large for him, and that disproportion is the story told in one object. The stone cannot go, for it is the cause of which the sword is only the sequel. The wreathed hat cannot go: it shadows the face and turns the victory inward. The feather rising along the inside of the leg is the boldest part and the most argued, and it is required, the one place besides the foot where giant and boy touch. What yields is the small relief on the helmet, which the eye cannot read at viewing distance, and the boots, a decision of costume more than a necessity. Nothing is idle at the scale of the whole.
Score: 8.8 / 10
What can be stated, and holds. Victory is shown as an aftermath and an inwardness: the boy does not exult, address or display; he looks down under the brim at nothing in particular, the sword grounded, the hand on the hip. The weak overcome the strong and remain weak in body after the act; the triumph is in a child who could not have done this by force. And the unclothed body, not idealised into the athlete, is shown as sufficient to bear a sacred and a civic meaning. What holds the axis exactly at its gate is that the work’s meaning is famously hard to state as one condition. Civic emblem, private delight, religious figure, an eros the feather makes explicit: the bronze discloses more than it settles, and part of what is read in it is brought to it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation of one register, a cool and uncanny beauty rather than grandeur or terror. Its places: the polished skin catching light against the darker, worked surfaces of hair, wreath and beard; the face under the brim, half in shadow and withdrawn; the smooth living foot on the dead, bearded face whose eyes are not quite closed; and the feather, which turns the eye up the leg and makes the beauty disturbing. It is a figure to walk round, and it rises again from several sides. What holds it: it is under life size, still, and at one temperature throughout; there is no transport by scale, and the terror of a beheading is set aside by design. High in kind and narrow in range, it stands below Michelangelo’s David, the Pietà and Saint Teresa, each at 9.1 here, which rise by scale, pathos or motion that it refuses.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth built and bearing load. The structure is the oldest of reversals, the small defeating the great, and the object carries it rather than alluding to it: the boy stands on the giant, a large head under a small foot. The particular holds, a specific adolescent body, a particular hat, a particular face in Goliath. A second myth is built into the costume: the brimmed hat and the boots recall Mercury, and whether the figure is David, Mercury or both has long been argued, which shows the archetypes overlapping in the object rather than summoned round it. In Florence the pattern was a civic myth as well, the small republic against the tyrant, and the figure’s move to the seat of government after 1494 made that reading public. Held below the top because the work’s ambiguity divides its myth as much as it doubles it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance: the clothed David of the Florentine tradition, Donatello’s own marble of 1408 to 1409 among it; the statue in the niche, made to be seen from the front and bound to a building; and a long reserve toward the nude, admitted for Adam and Eve, the damned and the body of Christ. The departure: a freestanding figure in the round, nude, in bronze, at about the size of the boy it shows, raised on a column to be walked round; a biblical hero made a naked adolescent in the pose of an antique god; the sensuality of the body not hidden but pointed to. The stake was real, and the unease the figure carries has outlived its maker in five centuries of argument over its eros. Held below the top because antiquity supplied the model to which the swerve returned.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Substitute another form and most of what the work knows goes. In relief or in a niche the body would be a picture of a body; freestanding, it has a back, a side and a weight on one leg, and the viewer who walks round it finds that the face meets theirs from no side. In marble the polished skin would lose the metal’s lustre against the chased hair and beard, and that contrast is how the work separates the living from the dead. At heroic scale the boy would cease to be a boy, and the disproportion of sword to body, the argument of the story, would go. The column set the face above the eye, so that the downward gaze fell toward those below and not upon them. Held a step below the top because the feather carries a meaning the form does not decide, and because part of the form, the column and the elevation, is lost.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence over promise: more than five centuries, and the questions remain open in the object. When was it made, and for whom: Cosimo de’ Medici, an earlier commission, a civic one? Is it David, or Mercury, or deliberately both? Does the eros of the figure belong to the maker, the patron, the culture of the courtyard or to modern readers? What do the feather, the gilding and the wreath mean? Is the face withdrawn, smug, dreaming or grieving? The literature has turned from style and dating to politics and to the history of sexuality, and the bronze sustains each turn; set beside Verrocchio’s David and Michelangelo’s, it yields more. Held below the top because the debate turns as much on patronage and context, which the object cannot answer, as on depths found in the bronze itself.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The field is Florentine sculpture from the 1430s to the 1450s. The intrinsic force is great: the bronze reopened the freestanding nude, and with it the statue as an autonomous body in space rather than a member of a building, a reorganisation of what sculpture could be after antiquity. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Verrocchio’s bronze David for the Medici, a direct answer; Michelangelo’s marble David, the colossal answer, which made the subject the emblem of the republic; Cellini’s Perseus standing on Medusa in the Loggia, the same pattern of victor over a severed head; the small bronze and the collector’s nude; and through them the nude as the central subject of European sculpture. Discounted a little for delay and privacy, since it stood in a family courtyard before it stood in public, and for its eclipse by Michelangelo’s; below Las Meninas at 9.5 for that eclipse.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at more than five and a half centuries. Form: whole. The figure, the head, the sword, the stone and the feather are as cast, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: in Florence throughout, in the Medici courtyard until 1494, then at the seat of government, and in the Bargello since the nineteenth century, in view nearly without break since at least 1469; its fame lifts the figure little. Fabric: bronze has borne the centuries well. The charges: the lost pedestal and column, which set its height; the gilding, reduced to traces; and a patina altered by time and earlier cleaning, so that the play of gold on dark bronze that the maker intended is now inferred rather than seen. The charges are real and small against the form, and the figure sits in the middle of the row for centuries with form whole.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Command of bronze in the round, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making bears load. The modelling of an adolescent body, neither athletic nor antique in proportion, with the soft belly, the thin arms and the weight thrown into one hip, is anatomically specific in a way no figure of its century matches. The finish is graded to meaning: the skin polished smooth; hair, wreath and beard chased and textured; the feather drawn out thin along the leg; the boots tooled. The cast is ambitious, a slender figure with an extended arm and a long blade. The charges: the boots and the wreath at the base are worked with less attention than the body, and the relief on the helmet is fine and illegible. The body is the summit of its century; the secondary parts hold the axis below the top.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the living boy’s withdrawn face under the brim at the top, and the dead giant’s face under the foot at the bottom. They obey one law. Both are turned down or away, both half lidded, both outside any exchange with the viewer; the living and the dead are made of the same metal and finished by the same hand, the one polished and the other chased. The sword’s weight answers the stone’s lightness, the hat’s brim the helmet’s, the feather the leg. Nothing in the figure contradicts its law. The range is two bodies, one alive and one dead, youth and age, victor and victim, held in one quiet register, and that range is narrow in kind. Narrowness is not coherence, and the axis stands below the top for it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The orders held: the sacred, in the biblical hero and the deliverance of a people; the state, in the myth of the small republic against the tyrant, which the move to the seat of government made public; the body, as the work’s subject and argument; desire, in the eros it does not conceal; death, in the head under the foot; antiquity and art, in the nude reborn and the Mercury in the costume; and youth against age. The pose integrates them: one boy, one act completed, one weight held. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the family, history beyond the story, the natural order beyond a wreath, and any consciousness but one, closed and unreadable. It is a single figure, and the mark describes the form; a tenth under the Laocoön’s group of three at 7.4.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.4, then The Made at 9.3, then The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 9.2. A figure whole as cast after more than five and a half centuries in Florence; modelling of an adolescent body specific beyond any figure of its century, its finish graded from polished skin to chased hair and beard; a freestanding nude in bronze that left the niche and the clothed David behind; and a reach that runs through Verrocchio, Michelangelo and Cellini to the nude as the central subject of European sculpture.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: the sacred, the state, the body, desire, death and antiquity are held in one pose, and labour, the family, history beyond the story and any consciousness but one closed mind are absent. Below the rest of the twelve, The Sublime at 8.3: a cool beauty under life size and at one temperature, the terror of a beheading set aside. Then The Unconcealment at 8.5, exactly at its gate: what the bronze shows can be stated and holds, and it discloses more than it settles.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Swerve at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 and The Unconcealment at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, the last exactly on it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it governs falls below The Sublime at 8.3, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Every summit condition is met. The twelve sum to 105.5, an average of 8.79 that displays 8.8, in Tier IV; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, two tenths short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the figure, its parts, proportion, finish and siting, and of its history in outline; known better as an object than as a document. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the bronze David in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence: one cast figure, Goliath’s head and the integral base included, whole as cast, with nothing that carries its meaning lost or replaced. Its first pedestal and column are lost; the gilding survives as traces; the patina has been altered by time and by earlier cleaning, and the figure has been cleaned in recent years. These bear on The Imperishable only. Donatello’s marble David of 1408 to 1409 and the Medici courtyard are context. The date is unsettled in the scholarship and is given as the range of proposals. The figure carries no words, and nothing is quoted. Left out as unverified: where on the figure the gilding survives; the occasion and source of the record of 1469; the years of the move to the Palazzo della Signoria and of its entry into the Bargello; a Latin inscription reported for the lost pedestal and its wording; the attribution of that pedestal; the subject and source of the relief on Goliath’s helmet; the species of the wreath at the base; the history of the figure’s identification as Mercury; early remarks on the figure, among them one reported from 1504 and a reported judgment that it seemed cast from life; the flaws and repairs of the cast; and the claim, often made, that it is the first freestanding nude bronze since antiquity.