Michelangelo, David, 1501-4 vs Bernini, David , 1623

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Michelangelo, David, 1501-4 vs. Bernini, David, 1623
Introduction
Historical works of art, such as paintings of kings, saints, and landscapes among others, show how painters, sculptors and architects did their work in their early days and the message passed across through these forms of art. These historical works of art reflect ideas that the artists had on matters of religion, politics, and family among others. Artists represented their ideas that reflected their own personal view, the existing physical environment and the general belief of the society that these artists lived in. this paper examines the works of Michelangelo and Bernini in their sculptures of the biblical David, and how these pieces of art relate to each other in terms motivation, style and the message each of them had (Roman 45). Though these works of art were done by different artists, it can be argued that both got their inspiration from the bible, Bernini`s sculpture was aimed at depicting a different point of view from that originally done by Michelangelo.
Discussion
The biblical story of David and Goliath motivated these two artists to recreate David into a visible figure that was aimed at enabling people visually understand this story. In doing so, the environment each of these artists lived in and their beliefs greatly influenced the way they depicted the figure of David. One of the beliefs that Michelangelo had was that art was to be used to worship God and therefore he considered recreating the human body as a perfect way of worshiping God (Jason 28). This belief by Michelangelo explains why he recreated his David nude, which was an attempt to appreciate every aspect of God`s creation of the human body. This one significant difference with that of Bernini, where he depicted David dressed, but rather concentrated on the movement of David as he attempted to kill Goliath. It is clear that Bernini was inspired and motivated with motion and emotion (Jason 44), which he translated into this piece of art. Unlike Michelangelo, Bernini was not inspired with the physical morphology but rather his activeness, an aspect that Bernini wanted to depict to the viewers. Other than their personal beliefs, the environment that these two artists existed in also influenced the way they made their works (Tolnay 23).
The sculpture by Michelangelo was done before that of Bernini. During the time of Michelangelo, the kind of architecture that existed was the Renaissance architecture, which was governed by strict laws regarding the symmetry and geometric design. This period influenced the way he sculpted his David, where he restricted any sort of movement to the sculpture (Ludwig & Michelangelo 4). This is different from that done by Bernini, which is seen to be freer and can be termed to be interacting with the surrounding environment. Michelangelo therefore made his piece of work more compact with very little forms of protrusions and uses facial expressions to show the emotions of the sculpture rather than the movements (Roman 48). This is seen from the manner in which Michelangelo`s David seems to show emotion by the use of body physic and facial expression, different from that of Bernini, which is aimed at showing the real action in the battle field. Apart from the limited movements of body parts, the Renaissance period enhanced the technique of the weight bearing foot, which was practiced in Greek (Sebastianelli).
From the statue of Michelangelo, one can see that David is shown to be standing, with the right foot bearing much of the weight and thus giving the body a more relaxed posture. This technique was used to depict the image as being more dynamic, and thus giving the viewer the opportunity to view it through several angles (Wittkower 17). Though Michelangelo uses this technique to give the sculpture more dynamism, Bernini`s technique achieves this to a greater degree, by giving the sculpture a lot of movement. During Bernini`s period, called the Baroque period (Wittkower, 1981), people were engaged in art reforms and hence art was not used to scare people and make them obedient.
This explains why Bernini`s sculpture seems to deviate from the Renaissance period practices and hence he gives it movement in space. Another point of argument here is that Bernini portrayed his sculpture in this manner to show not only rebellion to the Renaissance practices, but also show what was going on at that time (Roman 51).
(FIG.1: Michelangelo`s David. Adapted from The nudity of ‘David` by Michelangelo by Guy Shaked. /davidm.html)
By depicting David as fighting Goliath, Bernini wanted to show the kind of battle that existed at his time, where people were fighting against old practices, especially in art. Michelangelo lived in Florence, which was a city state of Italy. Early artists, Verrocchio and Donatello, had depicted David to be standing over Goliath after victory. In his work, Michelangelo decided to take a rather somewhat different turn by depicting David before the battle, tense (Wittkower 104). This is related to the area in which Mic...