Travel Italy Exploring Florence About The Upper Floors in Bargello
Travel Italy Exploring Florence About The Upper Floors in Bargello
At the top of the courtyard staircase, the loggia has been turned into an aviary for Giambologna's bronze birds, brought here from the Medici villa at Castello
. The doorway to the right at the top of the stairs opens into the fourteenth-century Salone del Consiglio Generale (room H), where the presiding genius is Donatello . Vestiges of the sinuous Gothic manner are evident in the drapery of his marble David , placed against the left wall, but there's nothing antiquated in the St George , carved just eight years later for the tabernacle of the armourers' guild at Orsanmichele and installed in a replica of its original niche at the far end of the room. If any one sculpture could be said to embody the shift of sensibility that occurred in Renaissance Florence, this is it: whereas St George had previously been little more than a symbol of valour, this alert, tense figure represents not the act of heroism but the volition behind it. In front stands Donatello's sexually ambiguous bronze David , cast in the early 1430s as the first freestanding nude figure since classical times and memorably described by Mary McCarthy as "a transvestite's and fetishist's dream." Back opposite the entrance door is Donatello's strange, jubilant figure known as Amor Atys , dating from the end of the 1430s, while his breathtakingly vivid bust of Niccolò da Uzzano nearby shows that he was just as comfortable with portraiture. The less complex humanism of Luca della Robbia is embodied in the glazed terracotta Madonnas set round the walls, while Donatello's master, Ghiberti , is represented by his relief of The Sacrifice of Isaac , his successful entry in the competition for the baptistry doors. The treatment of the same theme submitted by Brunelleschi - and rejected - is displayed close by. Most of the rest of this floor is occupied by a collection of European and Islamic applied art , of so high a standard that it would constitute an engrossing museum in its own right. Elsewhere is dazzling carved ivory from Byzantium and medieval France.
The sculptural display resumes upstairs, with Giovanni della Robbia 's pietà and Andrea della Robbia 's exquisite busts of a young woman and a boy. The Sala dei Bronzetti (room P) is Italy's best assembly of small Renaissance bronzes, with plentiful evidence of Giambologna's virtuosity at table-top scale. Lastly, rooms Q and R are devoted mainly to Renaissance portrait busts, including a small bronze group of Hercules and Antaeus by Antonio Pollaiuolo , possessing a power out of all proportion to its size.
