Art is often seen as inaccessible. It is either seen as being too far removed to be relatable or too abstract for comprehension. However, if correctly studied we can get to the centre of fantastic pieces, opening up a new centre for understanding – and garnering an impressive art knowledge. Donatello’s seminal sculpture St George is a perfect example of how this can be achieved.
You might think it’s simply a knight; a masterfully sculpted one, admittedly, but still simply a knight. However, if you pause and let your eyes linger on him, allowing yourself to know more about it, it becomes clear that he is much more than that.
There is so much more to works of art like this, but in order to appreciate something fully we have to highlight the aspects that one might oversee when looking at it and then add elements from its context that help us appreciate the statue a bit more.
Donatello’s St. George, (marble, free-standing statue, 1417) is a landmark piece in art historical terms, considered the first free standing statue of early Renaissance sculpture, where the Renaissance and its attention to realism emerge and overcome the rigid and frontal representation of the medieval. The statue is astonishing for its natural pose, the figure’s carefully individualised features, its meditative and determinate expression – and its clothing – rendered in the greatest detail. In St George, we see not only the intention to represent every possible detail – cloth, metal, leather, flesh, and hair – as closely to reality as possible, but also the fulfilment of that intention.
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%10980%%[/mm-hide-text]
Donatello manages to make us think that we are looking at a variety of different materials, when in fact the only thing that makes the statue is marble. Giorgio Vasari, the famous Sixteenth Century writer of the lives of Italian artists, remarks about the statue, “Life itself seems to be stirring vigorously within the stone…it had never been seen in modern statues yet.”
To visit St George, you must to go to the National Museum of Bargello in Florence (which is worth visiting for plenty of other pieces of amazing sculpture anyway). The original location of this work, though, was the Church of Orsanmichele, where all the guilds of the city had their own statue. More specifically, St George was the patron of armourers, hence the prominence of its shield and armour, and the deliberate emphasis on his virtues as a warrior.
That butchers, merchants, and shoemakers all had a statue symbolising their (profane) activity in a sacred space should not cause surprise in the context of how religion permeated every aspect of daily life in the Fifteenth Century.When we start to understand that art is not simply the representation of something is represented also matters, for the subject is always intimately linked with its context and time. When examined in this way, art gives us a glimpse of how people from totally different times perceived the world.
