At first glance, he just looks like a young man.
He is well planted on the ground.
His feet rest on the ground. It seems to be anchored to the ground with a shield, a pure geometric figure, a large rhombus crossed by a cross.
The left arm is stretched out along the body. The right-hand rests on the shield.
The short cloak is knotted at the neck. The head is uncovered. The serene face looks forward; the slightly frowning eyebrows, the wrinkles on the forehead, the strongly marked pupils give the sense of contained energy.
Yes, he is certainly a soldier, but he does not give the idea of an idealized fighter or hero. He seems, rather, to be any young man from Florence of the time who has achieved a victory. And that he did it not with physical strength, but with his intellectual and moral talents.
What he wants to represent is very clear, right from the start: it is the embodiment of courage, pride, "virtus", secular virtue, value.
Then one also realizes that the figure firmly dominates the space of the tabernacle in which it is inserted.
Indeed, it almost seems that the tabernacle cannot contain it or, perhaps, better, hold it back.
It almost seems that he wants to come out of it with "a fiercely terrible liveliness and a wonderful gesture of moving within that rock", just to resort to Vasari's prose, truly incomparable.
There is the plastic idea of a movement in power.
And there lies the core, the fundamental point that, alone, expresses all the energy and strength of the sculpture.
But if we stopped here, at what is most evident, we would be in danger of making a big mistake.
In reality, the most important thing in this figure is that which does not exist.
The young man does not have a halo: he lacks the distinctive sign of the saints.
He is not even rendered in an attitude of mysticism, devotion or contemplation.
And, instead, it is precisely a saint that is at issue.
To get confirmation, just go and look at the bas-relief below.
And there we find the scene of the fight of a knight who frees a princess from a dragon. We understand, so, without margin of error, that that young hero is St. George.
Before going on, let's summarize: in this sculpture, there are, at least, three great novelties.
There is the incarnation of a secular virtue in a Saint, there is the solidity of the pose and there is a new one with the surrounding space.
In order to fully understand these novelties, we need to take a step back and see what the history and external circumstances are that have produced this masterpiece.
The sculpture was commissioned to Donatello, in 1416, by the Art (the Corporation) of the Corrazzai and Spadai for their tabernacle in Orsammichele.
The Art, linked to the craft of gunsmiths, had as its patron saint, St. George, the holy knight par excellence, the liberator of the princess, the executioner of the Dragon.
Orsammichele was a very important building for the city with mixed destination, civil and religious together.
Below, closed off from the outside by a loggia, with the arches tamponade, there was the church dedicated to the Madonna.
And above, the two very high floors with the grain stores.
The seven major arts, together with six of the minor arts, had obtained permission to decorate the closed arches of the loggia with tabernacles leaning against the pillars.
The sculptures of the patron saints were to be placed inside the tabernacles.
The Art of the Corrazzai and the Spadai was a minor Art: for this reason, perhaps, it was assigned a smaller tabernacle than those of the others.
It was a pillar, originally destined not to have decoration, because it was placed in a corner and in correspondence with an internal staircase.
Donatello, Saint Mark
When he received the commission, Donatello, born in 1386, was thirty years old, already had experience as a goldsmith (like many of the contemporary artists) and, above all, he worked as a sculptor, both for the Opera del Duomo and for Osammichele for the Art of Linemen and Rigattieri, with the sculpture of San Marco. He is a brotherly friend of, about ten years older than him. Sometimes he argues with him, quarrels with him, but recognizes his intellectual value and shares his artistic principles.
A few years earlier he had made a fundamental journey: he had gone to Rome and there they had stayed for a long time, to study together the classical antiquities.
The "eternal city" was then almost unexplored from the artistic point of view, a destination only for religious pilgrimages.
The ancient remains were, for the most part, still buried, little visible, sometimes emerging - almost unrecognizable - from the ground, never restored or rearranged.
Rome was a depopulated, dirty city, with the holes reduced to pastures of sheep. There were few churches, few palaces.
It is clear that Donatello, with St. George, returns to an idea of virtue, based -especially on the example of the ancients- on rationality and intellect, rather than on faith.
It proposes a model of courage, firmness, and strength - not religious virtues, but human ones - from which anyone can learn, in a completely secular way.
And it is not without importance that the patronage of Saint George is secular: it is a Corporation, which decorates its tabernacle, outside a building, also destined for civil use.
And this produced important effects in the way this work was observed, experienced and understood by the citizens of Florence.
His new idea of the Donatello man was always to be re-proposed, even in sculptures intended for the decoration of churches or chapels, without it appearing to contradict a religiousness and spirituality lived authentically.
But with Saint George he created an example that had an importance, today we would say "media", but also educational, very great.
A young man of today finds his models in cinema, television, and books.
A fifteenth-century Florentine boy, to identify his heroes, his myths, had the sculptures, the paintings.
And he had to go to churches because it was there that most of the works of art were to be found.
Here, instead, he finds himself in front of a secular, open, public environment, a young man very similar to him, with a heroic and warlike attitude, who does not want to transmit to him the invitation to prayer and devotion, but the idea of the firmness of a strong soul.
He could not help but have an effect.
To exalt this new conception Donatello uses new instruments, which surprise and capture the attention, as Masaccio did in the Brancacci chapel.
He uses proportions, perspective, shadow, light to give solidity, concreteness, and truth to the representation.
The proportions, for example, are those of classical statuary.
Here, too, the new passes through a rediscovery, through a voluntary and conscious return to the old.
And then there is the new relationship between sculpture and space.
Donatello must take advantage of the small environment of the tabernacle, the narrowness of the niche.
But, instead of being limited by it, he takes advantage of it to make the figure come out more clearly.
He uses perspective to construct it diagonally and the shield - or rather the cross of the shield - makes it function as a fulcrum.
He also uses light, because it lets the shadow thicken in the niche, increasing the impression of depth.
Until it was there (now the statue with Saint George is kept in the Bargello museum) those who saw it from the street and discovered it, little by little, passing them in front of them, had the impression of a figure really occupying a space.
Although it must be said that it is in the base of the bas-relief, where St. George frees the princess, that Donatello fully exploits the new technique of perspective.
There he conceived the scene with a single point of escape, which is represented by the figure of St. George, used together, as a center of perspective and center of action.
Since he was interested in giving the greatest possible illusion of depth, he used, for the first time, another new technique, that of "crushing" or, to put it in Tuscan terms, "stacking": that is, the thickness of the relief decreases gradually and with millimetric variations, from the foreground (in which it is more accentuated) to the background.
This creates effects of chiaroscuro, light, and shadow that are very similar to those of painting.
In short, Donatello was really a great inventor and a great innovator of ideas and concepts.
The novelties of Saint George will return in all his works (in marble, bronze, terracotta).
But in his career, he will prove capable of completely changing his style. In his latest creations, he has reached an expressionism that is very far from the classical "measure" of St. George.
But this is another story that awaits to be told.