Bargello First Floor

We continued our tour of Bargello viewing Verrocchio's David, Donatello's David (bronze), Donatello's St George, and the famous Baptistry Doors Contest submission.

Verrocchio was a mid-15th Century painter and sculptor in Florence, who taught Leonardo da Vinci, who was perhaps the model for this David statue.

Goliath is having a bad day, no?

Donatello was the first great sculptor of the Renaissance.

As Europe’s first male nude in a thousand years, David was very controversial, may have once stood in the courtyard in Palazzo Medici, thus having political implications

Before Michelangelo’s David, Donatello’s St. George Slayer of Dragons was the unofficial symbol of Florence, stood in a niche in Orsanmichele Church.

In Genesis 22 there is a story about Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac.

That is the subject of these two panels, by Ghiberti on the left, and Brunelleschi on the right, which in 1401 were entered into a contest to decide who would be awarded the commission to decorate the door panels of The Baptistry of St John.

Ghiberti won the contest, and Brunelleschi would instead design and build the Dome atop Florence Cathedral, which is still to this day the fourth-largest dome, and largest brick dome in the world.