Donatello, St. George

For the Orsanmichele niche assigned to the guild of armorers and sword makers, Donatello created Saint George. The saintly knight stands proudly with his shield in front of him. He once held a bronze sword in his right hand and wore a bronze helmet on his head, both fashioned by the sponsoring guild. Saint George stands in a defiant manner – ready to spring from his niche to defend Florence against attack, his sword jutting out threateningly at all passersby. The saint’s body is taut, and Donatello gave him a face filled with nervous energy.

Directly below the statue’s base is Donatello’s marble relief representing Saint George slaying a dragon to rescue a princess. The relief marks a turning point in Renaissance sculpture. Donatello created an atmospheric effect by using incised lines. The landscape recedes into distant space, and the depth of that space cannot be measured. The sculptor conceived the relief as a window onto an infinite vista. To create that effect, Donatello used a pictorial device already known to the ancients – atmospheric perspective. Artists (painters more frequently than sculptors) using atmospheric perspective (sometimes called aerial perspective) exploit the principle that the farther back an object is in space, the blurrier and less detailed it appears. In Donatello’s Saint George and the dragon, the foreground figures are much sharper than the landscape elements in the background.^[1]