line that he founded eventually produced Mary who was the mother of Christ. Old Testament figures were given Christian visual meanings in the medieval Biblia pauperum, "a compendium of imagery connecting the Old and New Testaments" (Hartt 203). And, in Christian art David's defeat of Goliath "was made a prefiguration of Christ's temptation in the desert, by the devil, and was used in a wider context to symbolize the victory of right over wrong" (Hall 92).
In the versions of David discussed here, the earlier pair clearly stick to the Bible's account of David as a pretty young boy. But Donatello's bronze has been called, "by all odds the least expected work of the 1430s in any medium" (Hartt 202). This is because it was the first freestanding in-the-round nude since ancient times. Greenhalgh notes that the sculpture was made sometime after Donatello had visited Rome and was in contact with the humanist scholars there who were deeply interested in the revival of antique styles. Donatello's David "adopt[s] similar proportions to those in Alberti's De Statua of 1433," and Greenhalgh suggests the statue may be an exercise in recreating ancient style in a Christian context (80). If this is true it might explain the origin of the commission for this David because, as Hartt says, "the lascivious content of the statue" makes it very hard to guess what "the nature and destination of the work" could have been (Hartt 202).
Donatello's David wears only a pair of boots and a flat hat with laurel leaves on it. The hat could be a shepherd's hat and the laurel refers to his victory. But David himself is "a soft, effeminate boy of eleven or twelve" whose pose and gaze make him seem very detached from the violence he has engaged in (Hartt 202). His right foot rests casually on the head of Goliath, and one wing of Goliath's helmet "caresses the inside of the boy's right thigh" (Hartt 202). Hartt notes th
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