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

David as a Tyrant Slayer

The recent discovery of the inscription once on the David ("The victor is whoever defends the fatherland. God crushes the wrath of an enormous foe. Behold! A boy overcame a great tyrant. Conquer, o citizens!") (13) seems to calm the controversy as to whether the sculpture indeed represents the young giant slayer, at least on a primary level. (14) The inscription does not, however, narrow the range of dates for the sculpture, which different historians have placed as early as about 1428-30 and as late as after 1460. (15) Most scholars agree, however, that the Judith and Holofernes probably dates after Donatello's return to Florence from Padua, in 1453. Since the statue was recorded in the garden of the Medici Palace by 1469, possibly as early as 1464, it was most likely executed in the late 1450s or early 1460s and commissioned by Cosimo or Piero de' Medici. (16) If the late dating of the David proves correct, then it could have been commissioned by the Medici together with the Judith, but at this point there is insufficient evidence to confirm the theory.

The historical context of the bronze David provides some necessary background. Although very different in material and style from Donatello's earlier marble David (Fig. 4), it repeats the theme of David triumphantly standing with one foot on Goliath's decapitated head. Because David's identity as a victorious warrior has become so familiar to us through such later sculptures as Michelangelo's colossal David, we overlook that before Donatello's marble sculpture almost every representation of David interpreted him in other ways, as a king, prophet, writer of the Psalms, or ancestor of Christ. (17)

Documents indicate that in 1416 the marble David was transferred from the workshop at the cathedral of Florence and installed in the Palazzo della Signoria before a pattern of heraldic lilies painted expressly to complement it. (18) Its site at the seat of government against a backdrop of symbolic lilies, the emblems of Florence's alliance with the Angevin dynasty, argues that the theme was interpreted in political terms. Supporting evidence was recently found by Maria Monica Donato, who discovered two manuscript accounts that describe the Palazzo della Signoria in the early fifteenth century. They allude to an inscription, "To those who bravely fight for the fatherland god will offer victory even against the most terrible foes." (19) The manuscripts validate H. W. Janson's earlier, unproved speculation that this inscription might have been added to the sculpture by 1416, and that Donatello then recut the figure to emphasize a new political role for David as a defender of Florence by baring his left leg and r emoving the scroll formerly used to identify David as a prophet. (20)

The placement of the bronze David in the courtyard of the Medici Palace with an inscription of patriotic exhortation should be seen as a self-conscious allusion to the earlier marble analogue and its inscription. The marble David was at the time still standing in the priors' meeting hall in the Palazzo della Signoria, which made the Medici's identification with a symbol of the Florentine Republic all the more potent. The decision to situate an emblem of Florentine republican government in their palace could be understood as a sign that the Medici were closely connected to that regime and continued its ideals. Nevertheless, at the same time it represented an unprecedented appropriation by a single family of a corporate symbol of the state and informed the cognoscenti that true power resided several hundred meters north of the Palazzo della Signoria.