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Donatello's bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici rule in Florence - Bibliography

Art Bulletin, The, March, 2001 by Sarah Blake McHam

For all the individual analyses of Donatello's bronze David and Judith and Holofernes, these sculptures have rarely been considered jointly, despite the fact that they were displayed in coordinated outdoor spaces of the Medici Palace for about thirty years. I argue here that their iconography was meant to evoke republican themes, well known to the Florentine elite, that the Medici aimed to embrace and co-opt. (1) The associated meanings of the David and the Judith and Holofernes were signaled by their related inscriptions. As I shall demonstrate by reference to Greek and Roman authors, particularly Pliny the Elder, these two works drew on descriptions of the Athenian statue group called the Tyrannicides, and on the writings of the twelfth-century English theologian John of Salisbury, all well known in fifteenth-century Florence, for the purpose of creating a visual rhetoric insinuating that the Medici were defenders of Florentine liberty. These literary and artistic sources combine with the two sculptures' re lated size and material to strengthen the likelihood that the David and the Judith and Holofernes were intended as pendants. Together the sculptures conveyed the controversial, self-serving message that the family's role in Florence was akin to that of venerable Old Testament tyrant slayers and saviors of their people, symbolically inverting the growing chorus of accusations that the Medici had become tyrants who had sucked all real power out of the city's republican institutions.

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The Statues' Setting

Donatello's bronze sculptures of Judith and Holofernes (Fig. 1) and David (Fig. 2), according to evidence recently uncovered in contemporary sources, stood respectively in the Medici Palace garden and courtyard by 1469, possibly even as early as 1464-66. (2) They remained in these adjoining locations until 1495, after the Medici were expelled from Florence in the previous year. (3) We know that the palace was constructed for Cosimo de' Medici, between 1445 and the mid-1450s, but both sculptures are undocumented commissions. (4) They were installed in the palace within a decade after 1457, the approximate date when Cosimo, his two sons, and their families moved into the recently completed residence. The sculptures' status as two of the earliest freestanding Renaissance statues makes the uncertainties of their dates and patronage particularly tantalizing, because these pieces are crucial to the reconstruction of the history of Italian Renaissance art. (5) Nevertheless, their existence in the Medici Palace court yard and garden for about thirty years allows them to be studied jointly in the context of their placement within the most public spaces of the palace that served as the de facto seat of Florentine political power. Investigation of the sculptures reveals a prime and largely unexplored example of how Cosimo and Piero de' Medici contributed to the creation of a family imagery in the secular context most closely identified with it, the newly constructed palace on the Via Larga. (6)

The bronzes were focal points of the two connected open spaces, the courtyard and garden (Fig. 3). The axial arrangement of the palace's main entrance and courtyard means that the David, which was raised on a high base at the center of the courtyard, was visible even from the street when the main portal of the palace was open. (7) Although there is no certainty about the precise position of the Judith and Holofernes in the garden, (8) since the garden was just behind the courtyard, the sculpture could have been visible from the courtyard if it was situated on the garden-courtyard axis. Nevertheless, as the courtyard was open to palace visitors and the garden to an invited group, the two statues were readily accessible to the desired audience. (9)

The family's suites were grouped around the palace's most striking innovation all'antica, the first colonnaded courtyard of the Renaissance, in which the David was positioned centrally. The courtyard, whose proportions and regular shape determined the impressive symmetry of the palace's plan, established a new type of interior formal space that came to supplant the exterior loggia on the Medici and other Florentine palaces as the site of formal receptions and family rituals. Behind it, the walled garden, with arcaded loggias at its north and south sides, provided a more private outdoor area, which was sometimes open to guests to the palace and used in conjunction with the central court when magnificent occasions, such as the wedding of Lorenzo de' Medici and Glance Orsini in 1469, demanded additional space. (10)

The Medici family expended considerable attention on the decorative program for the courtyard and garden. Complementing the classicizing columns in the courtyard were sgraffito decoration of garlands and shields decorated with the Medici palle (or balls), as well as a series of roundels above the arcade of the courtyard. These stone roundels, of uncertain date and attribution, seem like large-scale sculptures derived from ancient gems and incised precious stones acquired by the Medici. Perhaps they were intended to remind the visitor of the family's prestigious collection and interest in antiquity. (11) There were ancient sculptures flanking the interior portals of the garden, notably, two of Marsyas on either side of the exit to the Via de' Ginori. (12)

Donatello's bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici rule in Florence - Bibliography

Art Bulletin, The, March, 2001 by Sarah Blake McHam

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