compared with Bernini's DAVID
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But let�s go back and look at the David that Bernini was trying to show up. Let�s have a look at the David, Michelangelo�s David. Let�s look at what is good. Let�s do as the Greeks did and keep models of perfection before our eyes. Vasari said that anyone who had seen this one statue had no need to see anything else by any other sculptor, living or dead. Should we go along?
The David is the most glorious, the most sublime, nude ever sculpted�on either side of the Middle Ages. Like the miracle that it is it seemed to have come from nowhere�there�s no other figure that, as the art historians say, �leads up to it�. The Laoco�n, which is anyway inferior to it, wasn�t found until a year or two after he had carved the David and so couldn�t have influenced Michelangelo at all. It was his own invention�the result of his long and intense studies of the human body, including his dissection of cadavers. Here was the human body re-designed by the mind of the artist and sculpted out in marble for all to see. Looking at it, one felt awe�awe at the way such a figure had come to be carved out of a giant block of Carrara, but also awe at the young hero who seemed to defy all the evil of life. This David was as great as a god. Many people felt this awe, called in Italian terribilit�, and they used it ever after to talk about Michelangelo�s style. It was almost otherworldly.
What you notice right off is that the figure is all part of a single design. Any part leads you back to the general plan. This is due to the importance Michelangelo and all the Florentines gave to drawing. Drawing, especially from memory, is the artist�s transformation of what he sees into the shapes and proportions of beauty. He puts down what he sees and gives it a design, a shape�perhaps a circle, a triangle, a curve�the forms our imagination deals in. Parallel lines, symmetry. This design is what makes the drawn objects themselves pleasing to us, though the objects can be pleasing for other reasons. The presence of this dominant design in a work is its claim to art.
The general design dominates the David but all the details of every part of his body are themselves little subordinate designs. No part is simply �copied� from nature without an interpretation, without some perfecting by Michelangelo; and all of them are included in the general design. The toes are part of the sweep of the leg; the curls of the hair help establish the curve of the neck.
David is serene. He hasn�t yet acted. He is action in potentia. Michelangelo has given him just enough movement�the free swing of his left leg, the raised left arm, the gaze to the left�to make him come alive. But the real secret of the awesomeness is not, as Bernini would have thought, the motion, but the contrast. One leg swings while the other rests; one arm hangs loose while the other bends. The line of the hips contrasts with the line of the rib-cage, the shoulders and the nipples. Michelangelo wasn�t guided in his conception by what the shepherd boy �would really have looked like� but by the demands of his beautiful design.
Look at the unique torso of Michelangelo�s David. It is architecture. Every detail of anatomy is digested and re-made to fit the general design. Michelangelo never lost sight of it. He didn�t overload the chest with too many details for the sake of realism or to show off his knowledge of anatomy. Only those shapes (their shadows) are carved which underscore the geometry of his figure.
It is true that illustration is at the bottom of painting and sculpture. But you must determine just what you are going to illustrate. In the case of the David and Goliath story, is it the grunts and the exertion of the shepherd boy? Does it matter just how he loaded his sling? Is that important?
The great mission of the boy, his inspiration by God, his courage, his calmness, his depth�that is the message you must illustrate, Mr. Bernini. You have merely done a guy struggling with a strap. What can you think as you watch the athlete grimace?
Because thinking, meditation, is what great art is about. The viewer comes to see the figure in a mood of reflection. Probably the art �lover� is predisposed in this way. He likes the church-like silence of the gallery and the museum. He expects the painting or the sculpture to take him inside himself. He wants to admire, to be awed, to love. There is a pleasure in reflection that can�t be equalled by anything else in life, and art brings it on.
The Moment of Rest
Great art is about a moment of rest: it stops action for a moment. Stops it forever. Of course, so does a photograph, and how many of those are art? The question is both what moment to depict and when to freeze it. Bernini committed a basic error when he made his David so busy, so nervously active. The whole figure is like the grimace on his face: it is unattractive. It is actually off-putting. You feel you have discovered him at the wrong moment. Perhaps you should politely wait while he finishes his activity, and then visually chat with him. And there is no comfortable point of view, no viewer�s chair to watch him. Why look from any point in particular? He is tiring to behold, not relaxing�the opposite of the goal of art.
Bernini believed that to improve upon Michelangelo he had to take the path of realism. Michelangelo�s heroes had a dynamism about them which was surely their secret. They seemed to move or to be about to move. Bernini guessed�wrongly�that he could give them more life if the movement were more lively, more violent. So he exaggerated the movement and focused on gesture. An unmistakable feature of a Bernini statue is the outstretched arms and legs, the fingers wiggling in the air. Michelangelo had a precept: a great statue should be able to roll down a hill and not lose any of its important parts. Roll a Bernini down a hill and see how many broken marble pieces (arms, legs, drapery, and so on) you have to pick up.
What this all amounts to is that Bernini�s David isn�t abstract enough, it isn�t idealized enough, to take the viewer away from earth and into the mystery of the divine story. His David is just a man, no more than a real man. He is well-made, understand, and handsome; his limbs and torso are wonderfully well-proportioned. But they are the familiar limbs and torso of the studio model. They are copies of nature: there is not enough of the artist�s insides in them.
Extraneous details
Bernini was right in saying that the Michelangelo�s David is no good except from the front. Michelangelo knew that and it didn�t bother him. Though it is always said, and mostly thought, that a work of sculpture must be �interesting from all sides�, that is impossible. A statue is understood, appreciated, exhibited from its best side�the side that the sculptor liked best. If he is lucky he might get a second or even a third �good side�, but it will be a �side� all the same, with a view that he perfected, two-dimensionally, on a sheet of paper or a model. The exceptions, like Giovanni Bologna�s Hercules and Cacus in the loggia of the Piazza di Signoria, are tours de force that only prove the rule. They almost make you dizzy. None of the Master�s figures are meant to be seen from all sides. (The Laoco�n isn�t either, by the way.) Trying to make several figures out of one can be a nice challenge but it is a waste of time.
But the Laoco�n? you might wonder. Is that not a scene of intense busy-ness? It is hard to imagine a work of sculpture where more is �happening�: the priest and his sons are fighting with the snakes, twisting and squirming all over the relief.
Though Winckelmann and Lessing were bothered only by the Laoco�n�s face, the earlier Greeks would probably have questioned the whole conception. It is actually the face that saves the work from complete failure�it is the only point of rest in the relief. The three sculptors from Rhodes nearly made the same mistake as Bernini in his David. The Laoco�n should have been a painting, not a relief. It has been pushed beyond the limits of sculpture. The sculptors were showing off their skill in carving and their prodigious knowledge of anatomy�who can forget the central nude?
So far we have seen a couple of the requirements of great art. One was the incorporation of all the parts of the figure into a general and beautiful design.
Another was the choice of a quiet moment, however pregnant with future action.
A third is simplicity. Bernini flubbed here too. He couldn�t help but pile on the decoration, he couldn�t stay his impulsive hand. He couldn�t let his figure alone, in peace.
As an abstraction, as a kind of metaphor, Michelangelo�s David is lean. The subject was a shepherd boy but Michelangelo knew how to leave out his crook and his wool shirt and the sheep. He didn�t want anything at all to get in the way of his essential design�no drapery, no accessories of any kind. This stone David was the David of the Bible but he was also man�beautiful, wonderful man as God had created him. He would also do, and do very well, for an Adam, an Adam before the Fall. He stands on a simple rock. If it weren�t for the weakness of the stone around his ankle, which required some sort of reinforcement that Michelangelo turned into the trunk of a tree, the statue would stand absolutely alone on that rock. Only the sling�not a very developed sling!�would give a hint of the story.
Compare that with Bernini�s David. By his day men felt squeamish about a completely naked figure so the first thing Bernini did was put a drape around his David�s loins. Brilliant drapery was one of the hallmarks of Bernini�s style. No one ever made cloth come alive as he did. This one is done with his usual grace and it keeps harmony with his essential design, so let�s not object to it.
Now he felt he needed more to help his viewer identify the figure, so he hung a shepherd�s bag around David�s chest. Or maybe he did that because it struck him that the curve of David�s back as seen from the front threw the figure off-center and the bag pulled the viewer�s eye back where it belonged. In any case, that was already two things covering the nude.
Statues always break sooner or later. Bernini knew darn well that those skinny columns for legs wouldn�t hold the weight of the figure in the long run, and he left a good chunk of the block for support. He honestly tried to restrain himself and keep the decoration down to a minimum, but the flesh is weak and he got carried away. He couldn�t let the support be nothing at all�it had to be a collection of something. So there ended up being all the articles in the Bible story about David, including his harp and his lionskin, and maybe the clothes that he took off when he danced naked later on as king.
Bad artists have trouble subordinating the details of their work to their design. They can�t see the woods for the trees�nor can the viewer of their work. They decorate all over the place. They lose sight of the original plan, if they had one.