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Donatello
David
circa 1440-1460
No modern image is more blatantly sexual than Donatello's 15th-century statue of a naked youth, his smooth flesh set off by tight boots as he rests a foot in the soft hair of the slain Goliath. Androgynous and overtly teasing, it makes you self-conscious to look too long at this magnetic work in the Bargello Museum, in Florence. In fact, this is the first free-standing nude statue of the Renaissance. It embodies, literally, the revival of ancient Greece and Rome. Yet for all its centrality to the textbook history of art, Donatello's provocation refuses to become a bore. It throbs with ecstasy and danger.
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