Travel Reference
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The challenge looming on the horizon was how to integrate the existing Christian society's
sense of itself with the sudden influx of the classical heritage.
Donatello's David is one of the first images created in the new century that explicitly ad-
dresses this cultural tension. On the one hand he is clearly a hero stepping forth from the
Judeo-Christian tradition. But the band across the front of him inscribed with a Roman pro-
verb simultaneously invokes the classical tradition. He is clearly shown in this way to have
a foot in both worlds, and we are to understand that having two legs to stand on can only
make him stronger. As a stand-in for the Florentine Republic, he embodies the alchemical
processofblendingthesetwotraditionsthatisthegrandchallengeof15
th
centuryFlorence.
***
Several decades later Donatello created another David. No one knows exactly when, but a
reasonable guess is that it was done sometime around mid-century. This second David was
recently cleaned and restored (2008/09), a procedure that took over a year to carry out. On
our visits to the Bargello Museum in Florence with our groups, we would see him lying
on his back, like a patient etherized upon a table, while women in white smocks went over
every square centimeter of his torso. It's good to see him back on his feet again.
This second David is an enigmatic creature. We know who he is from the stone that he
holds in one hand, the sword that he holds in the other hand, and the severed head of Go-
liath that lies at his feet. After that we step into the realm of mystery. He has long, lovely
hair that, since his cleaning and restoration, we now know was once brightly golden. He
wears a bonnet decorated with flowers. Although he has male genitals, he has a decidedly
feminine quality about him. No massive pectorals here. He has the soft protruding belly,
budding breasts and rounded buttocks of an adolescent girl.
One strategy for explaining David's effeminate qualities is to speculate that Donatello
might have been gay. But this is hardly a convincing explanation. Had Donatello done
a series of statues of effeminate males over the course of his lifetime, this might tell us
something about Donatello's proclivities. But since this David is very much a one-of-a-
kind in the context of Donatello's hugely diverse work, speculating about Donatello's sex
life doesn't really help us understand this figure's mysteries.
I believe that a more fruitful approach is to recognize this figure of David as a hermaphrod-
ite. In a sense, it's obvious but the sheer oddness of imagining David in this way has made
it unthinkable. Yet, as soon as you unpack the term “hermaphrodite”, it begins to make
sense. The hermaphrodite in classical mythology was so named because he/she was the
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