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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
Donatello's bronze represents Judith as chaste and humble, although the sensuous implications of her encounter with Holofernes and the ways in which she guilefully ensnared him are amply suggested by their intimate physical positioning: she stands on his wrist and straddles his chest. (81)
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The topicality of John's treatise helps to explain the commission for the first monumental, three-dimensional statue of the story of Judith and Holofernes. The brutal decapitation reflects his citation of Holofernes' murder as the prime example of justified killing of an overlord who disobeyed God's laws. John singled out the sword as the suitable agent of retribution against a ruler who unlawfully used it against his people: "For whosoever takes up the sword deserves to perish by the sword." (82) The unprecedented portrayal of a decapitation in progress is the physical embodiment of John's theory about the actual separation of the head from the body politic, that is, the severing of the tyrant from his state in a wholly justifiable murder. (83) Even though David's killing of Goliath was not cited as an example of tyrannicide in the Policraticus, Donatello's depiction of the boy standing victorious, sword in hand, over the decapitated head of Goliath easily relates to John's ideas. Like Holofernes, Goliath wa s the major warrior of an army menacing the Jews. Holofernes' killing by a woman and Goliath's death at the hands of a boy could only have been accomplished with God's help. Despite the fact that David killed Goliath with a stone, the sword, the means John recommended to slay a tyrant, and Goliath's severed head are emphasized. The inscription originally on the statue's base and the statue's inevitable association with the nearby Judith and Holofernes reinforced the appropriateness of interpreting the killing of Goliath as another illustration of justified tyrannicide.
The David and the Judith and Holofernes, sculptural centerpieces of the two most public spaces in the Medici Palace, thus seem to have been coordinated in a program that was calculated to advertise to invited guests that Cosimo and his family were protectors of liberty--in a period when that was very much in question and in need of corroboration. Their control of Florence was sufficiently threatened that in 1458 Cosimo secretly consulted with Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan about sending troops to Florence should conspiring against the regime explode into fighting. Cosimo next masterminded a series of changes that weakened traditional republican governmental structures. These were confirmed by a sham parlamento, in which the intimidated citizenry surrounded by armed soldiers voted to consolidate the family's hold on power. Cosimo and then Piero ruled for the next eight years, taking harsh measures to suppress any opposition. In this period they had a great need to deflect charges of tyranny from themselves. Do natello's statues conveyed that message powerfully by suggesting instead that the Medici family should be seen in the flattering light of celebrators, even preservers, of Florentine liberty against any threat, a self-serving political strategy that many Florentines would have considered outrageous. (84)
