03 — ARTWORK
St George
- MEDIUM
- Marble, height 214 cm
- TYPE
- Religious
PALETTE
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- FILE
- 600 × 1337 px · JPEG
COMMENTARY
UNDERLINED TERMS ARE DEFINED IN THE GLOSSARY.
"For the Armourers' GuildAn association of the masters of a particular craft, trade or profession (painters, goldsmiths, surgeons, and so on) set up to protect its members' rights and interests. Such guilds existed in virtually every European city in the 16th century. The guild also monitored standards of work, acted as a court for those who brought their trade into disrepute, and provided assistance to members in need. Donatello made a very spirited figure of St George in armour, expressing in the head of this saint the beauty of youth, courage and valour in arms, and a terrible ardour. Life itself seems to be stirring vigorously within the stone "(Vasari).
The youthful period of Donatello is typified by his St George. This statue, executed around 1416, was placed in a niche on the north wall of Orsanmichele. The tensed expression of the young face shows its affinity with the ideal of David in the Bargello. The cloak gathered over the chest in a tight knot falls in folds whose spiral line retains an echo of the GothicGothic, which may well have originated with Alberti as a derogatory term and which certainly corresponds to Vasari's 'maniera tedesca' ('German style'), is properly the descriptive term for an artistic style which achieved its first full flowering in the Ile de France and the surrounding areas in the period between c. 1200 and c. 1270, and which then spread throughout northern Europe. It is characterized by the hitherto unprecedented integration of the arts of sculpture, painting, stained glass and architecture which is epitomized in the great cathedrals of Chartres, Amiens, and Reims or in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. In all the arts the predominantly planar forms of the Romanesque are replaced by an emphasis on line. There is a transcendental quality, whether in the soaring forms of the pointed arches or in the new stress on the humanity of Christ, which similarly distinguishes it from the preceding Romanesque style. In thinking of Nicola (d. c. 1284) or Giovanni Pisano (d. after 1314) there is same danger of forgetting what had happened in French sculpture half a century or more earlier, and likewise it is hard to remember that the spectacular achievements of early Renaissance art are a singularly localized eddy in the continuing stream of late gothic European art. By northern European standards few Italian works of art can be called gothic without qualification, and the story of 13th and 14th century Italian architecture is as much one of resistance to the new style as of its reception, whether directly from France or through German or central European intermediaries. In sculpture and in painting, the Italian reluctance to distort the human figure, conditioned by a never wholly submerged awareness of the omnipresent antique heritage, gives a special quality to the work of even those artists such as Giovanni Pisano or Simone Martini who most closely approached a pure gothic style. Nevertheless, the vitalizing role of Northern gothic art throughout the early Renaissance and the period leading up to it should never be underestimated. The artistic, like the cultural and commercial, interaction was continuous and much of the Italian achievement is incomprehensible if seen in isolation. It is not merely at the level of direct exchanges between one artist and another, or the influence of one building; painting, manuscript or piece of sculpture upon another, that the effects are to be felt. The streaming quality of line which is so characteristic of Brunelleschi's early Renaissance architecture surely reflects a sensitivity to the gothic contribution which is entirely independent of, and lies much deeper than, the superficial particularities of form. The counterflow of influence and inspiration from South to North must likewise not be underrated. In particular, the contribution of Italian painters from Duccio and Simone Martini onwards is central to the evolution of the so-called International Gothic style developing in Burgundy, Bohemia and north Italy in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. world, as does the position of the statue in its niche. But the problem of space has been overcome, and the St George, turning on the axis of the shield, moves with a great visionary force.
The basemolded foot of a pillar or column providing the transition from the plinth to the shaft. of the niche, with the bas-relieflow relief, a sculptured relief in which the desighn stands out only a little from the background. representing the saint's combat with the dragon for the freeing of the Princess of Cappadocia, also assumes a role of great importance due to the artist's use of the technique known as rilievoIn painting, the impression that an object is three-dimensional, that it stands out from its background fully rounded. stiacciato, or flattened reliefA sculptural work in which all or part projects from the flat surface. There are three basic forms: low relief (bas-relief, basso rilievo), in which figures project less than half their depth from the background; medium relief (mezzo-rilievo), in which figures are seen half round; and high relief (alto rilievo), in which figures are almost detached from their background..
The positive appraisal of the St George in the 16th century is borne out by the writings of Vasari. In later centuries, when Donatello's works were generally ignored or mentioned only in local guides, the transfer (after 1677) of the statue of St George to the tabernaclea small canopied recess or container in which the Eucharist or a holy relic is kept. of the Arte dei Medici e Speziali (made for the Madonna della Rosa), contributed to the diminishing of its beauty and therefore its fame. Donatello was rediscovered in the 19th century and St George, the masterpieceA term now loosely applied to the finest work by a particular artist or to any work of art of acknowledged greatness or of preeminence in its field. Originally it meant the piece of work by which a craftsman, having finished his training, gained the rank of'master' in his guild. of Donatello was about to become the emblem of early Renaissance statuary.
CITE THIS RECORD — BIBTEX
@online{wga-r3a9b8097723ebd,
author = {Krén, Emil and Marx, Daniel},
title = {St George by DONATELLO},
organization = {{Web Gallery of Art}},
date = {2026-09-13},
url = {https://beta.wga.hu/artists/donatello-r431353c604b592/st-george-r3a9b8097723ebd},
urldate = {2026-09-13},
langid = {english}
}ACCESSED 2026-09-13. REPLACE THE AUTHOR FIELD WITH THE COMMENTARY AUTHOR WHERE ONE IS NAMED.
