This exhibition – the first major show in Britain to focus on the Renaissance master Donatello – begins and ends with David, the youth who slew Goliath, and rarely has there been such a slender, graceful victor. The first is marble, with elegant Grecian face and insolent pose, one of the sculptor’s first civic commissions, for Florence cathedral. At his feet is the head of the Philistine, looking for all the world as if he were asleep, David’s catapult resting on his head with the rock ready inside.
The other David, at the end, is famously nude (the first entirely naked male figure of the Renaissance), all the more surprising because he’s wearing a hat like the god Mercury, his hand on his hip: the most beautiful statue made since antiquity.
