Despite nearly 2000 years separating the creation of Polykleitos’s Doryphoros and Donatello’s David, the two sculptures shared astonishingly similar features, yet both remained true to the stylistic characteristics of their respective time periods. These artists incorporated both predictable and cutting edge ideas into their works. Doryphoros, also known as the Spear Bearer, was a marble reinvention of Polykleitos’s original bronze sculpture circa 450 - 440 BCE. Most ancient Greek statues were made of bronze; because bronze was so valuable and could easily be melted down to make weapons, very few of the original figures remain. Therefore, most of our understanding of ancient Greek sculptures comes from Roman marble replicas (Khan Academy).
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The artist was commissioned by the Medici family in the 1440s to create a sculpture that was to be placed in the courtyard of the family’s private palace. Medicis were the forerunners of the Florentine Republic’s trendsetters. The family wanted the artwork as a symbol of their city. They did not want it to be like any other statue of David before, and Donatello delivered. His David is a bronze sculpture of the Biblical hero David, from the book of Samuel in the Old Testament. Typically, a hero who slew a giant such as David would be depicted as a masculine and muscular man similar to Doryphoros. However, Donatello created a soft, youthful, and almost feminine version of David that no one of his time had yet imagined. The figure reflects something of more similarity to the Kritios Boy than to Doryphoros. Donatello’s David flaunted long curly hair and flower-lined hat. While one hand grasped the sword used to slay the giant, the other rested casually upon his hip, a common stance of female statues of the time. Likewise, while one foot was placed on the severed head of Goliath, the other was caressed by the feather of a helmet and pointed suggestively up his leg to his groin. Though David was usually depicted as a king, in this piece of artwork Donatello went back to an earlier stage of David’s life. …show more content…
Their strikingly similar postures are not the result of coincidence. They both lean in a casual, comfortable stance that the human body naturally takes. This pose is called “contrapposto,” or a counterpoise. The body’s weight is shifted throughout the body in a way that the body would normally flow. One foot is positioned further forward than the other, sending more weight to the back foot. The knees are slightly bent and the torso is rotated ever so slightly. This phenomenon is seen in both figures. Rigid lines from centuries past gave way to a more logical depiction of man (Discovering the Humanities, see Fig. 1.24). The gesture of contrapposto became a focal point in Classical art, which Donatello brought back almost two millenniums later. It celebrates the natural beauty of man and his
The artist was commissioned by the Medici family in the 1440s to create a sculpture that was to be placed in the courtyard of the family’s private palace. Medicis were the forerunners of the Florentine Republic’s trendsetters. The family wanted the artwork as a symbol of their city. They did not want it to be like any other statue of David before, and Donatello delivered. His David is a bronze sculpture of the Biblical hero David, from the book of Samuel in the Old Testament. Typically, a hero who slew a giant such as David would be depicted as a masculine and muscular man similar to Doryphoros. However, Donatello created a soft, youthful, and almost feminine version of David that no one of his time had yet imagined. The figure reflects something of more similarity to the Kritios Boy than to Doryphoros. Donatello’s David flaunted long curly hair and flower-lined hat. While one hand grasped the sword used to slay the giant, the other rested casually upon his hip, a common stance of female statues of the time. Likewise, while one foot was placed on the severed head of Goliath, the other was caressed by the feather of a helmet and pointed suggestively up his leg to his groin. Though David was usually depicted as a king, in this piece of artwork Donatello went back to an earlier stage of David’s life. …show more content…
Their strikingly similar postures are not the result of coincidence. They both lean in a casual, comfortable stance that the human body naturally takes. This pose is called “contrapposto,” or a counterpoise. The body’s weight is shifted throughout the body in a way that the body would normally flow. One foot is positioned further forward than the other, sending more weight to the back foot. The knees are slightly bent and the torso is rotated ever so slightly. This phenomenon is seen in both figures. Rigid lines from centuries past gave way to a more logical depiction of man (Discovering the Humanities, see Fig. 1.24). The gesture of contrapposto became a focal point in Classical art, which Donatello brought back almost two millenniums later. It celebrates the natural beauty of man and his