David and Goliath

1 Samuel 17

Commentaries by Andrea Olsen Lam

Works of art by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Pesellino (Francesco di Stefano) and Unknown artist, Constantinople

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Head on a Plate

Commentary by Andrea Olsen Lam

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This early seventh-century silver plate is the largest (approx. 50 cm in diameter) in a set of nine plates that depicts events from the life of David, including his slaying of a lion, his anointing by Samuel, and his wedding to Michal (1 Samuel 16–18). Based on the control stamps on its reverse, the plate was crafted around the reign of Emperor Heraclius (610–41 CE).

The upper zone depicts the verbal exchange between David and Goliath, with a personification of the river from which David gathered five stones. The central zone depicts David and Goliath in close combat. The billowing fabric on David’s arm indicates swift movement in the classical tradition. Goliath wears ornate Persian armour and headgear. David’s dynamic stance contrasts with his frontal gaze and peaceful expression, which are juxtaposed against Goliath’s forward motion with raised spear and stern, profile gaze.

The lower zone portrays David decapitating the giant’s head at the moment Goliath is falling to the ground. In all three scenes David wears a halo, denoting his saintly, heroic status. All figures are depicted in the classical tradition, with attention to proportion, the bodies’ musculature, the garments’ movements and realistic details.

Since the 1970s, scholars have presumed that this plate symbolically represents the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius as a new David, subsequent to his victorious conquests against the Persians (Wander 1973: 89–104; Trilling 1978: 249–63). A more recent interpretation argued that the silver plate does not relate at all to the Byzantine emperor, but instead represents David as a classical hero in a manner that reflects late antiquity’s Christianization of the domestic sphere (Leader 2000: 407–27). Upon close inspection, fresh interpretations are possible—as I show elsewhere in this exhibition.

References

Leader, Ruth E. 2000. ‘The David Plates Revisited: Transforming the Secular in Early Byzantium’, Art Bulletin 82.3: 407–27

Trilling, James. 1978. ‘Myth and Metaphor at the Byzantine Court: A Literary Approach to the David Plates’, Byzantion 48.1: 249–63

Wander, Steven H. 1973. ‘The Cyprus Plates: The Story of David and Goliath’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 8: 89–104

All’s Fair in Love and War

Commentary by Andrea Olsen Lam

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This is the first in a set of two ornately-painted panels (each measuring 45.5 x 179.2 cm) that offer a beautiful—and beautified—rendition of the narrative of 1 Samuel 17.

Unlike some more famous Renaissance depictions of David as hero, Francesco Pesellino’s (1422–57) panels depicting David’s life do not portray David as an emblem of the Florentine Republic, but depict the popular narrative for a domestic context. Pesellino portrays a sequence of vignettes spanning David’s work as a shepherd, Goliath’s taunts, and David’s victory, set within a flower-laden battlefield, replete with armoured Renaissance warriors on horseback. This panel is followed by a second panel (both completed c.1445–55) depicting a triumphal procession culminating with a wedding party outside the city walls (1 Samuel 18).

In the central foreground, David decapitates the fallen Philistine giant amid horses and warriors. The heavily-armed knights on horseback who surround David make him look as misplaced as the biblical text paints him to be: he is a mild-looking shepherd boy, not a warrior prepared for battle. Indeed, David fights without a horse or spear. But he is equipped with courage and divine protection.

Given the presence of Medici emblems in the painting and the Medici family’s self-identification with the biblical David, some scholars have proposed that Pesellino’s panels may have been commissioned for a Medici wedding and would originally have decorated a private chamber in a home. In such a context the new husband might be likened to David, a victorious youth who married a royal bride. The panel might even express the groom’s aspirations for future political authority. However, recalling that David later became an adulterer and murderer (2 Samuel 11), the portrayal of David on wedding furniture seems an odd choice. I explore other possible interpretations in this exhibition’s comparative commentary.

References

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/francesco-pesellino-the-st…

Never Alone

Commentary by Andrea Olsen Lam

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Like several Renaissance sculptors before him—including Donatello, Verrocchio, and Michelangelo—Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) distils the David and Goliath narrative into a single figure (completed between 1623–24), supplying his slingshot and Saul’s armour at his feet as identifying attributes. Unlike earlier sculptures, which portray David calmly staring down his enemy or standing triumphantly after the battle, Bernini’s David is actively taking aim at Goliath (Hibberd 1965: 55). By removing the trappings of context—and even Goliath himself—we come face-to-face with an exemplum of faith in action.

Bernini’s white marble masterpiece resembles an ideal male athlete with the addition of a cloth that drapes around his waist at an angle, adding both modesty (deemed appropriate after the Council of Trent in 1545–63) and highlighting the dynamic, chiastic arrangement of David’s limbs. The seventeenth-century commentators Baldinucci and Bellori identified the dominant emotion in his eyes as ‘righteous anger’ (sdegno) against the enemy who defied God’s armies (1 Samuel 17:26; see Riegl 1912: 112–13; Glen 1996, esp. n.1), while others suggest that David’s expression reveals his determination and faith in God, as reflected in his statement to Saul:

The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine. (1 Samuel 17:37; see Glen 1996: 89–91)

David’s intense expression and convincing pose bring us so psychologically and physically near the battle that we half-expect to glimpse Goliath over our shoulder. Scholars have alternately suggested that the viewer stands between David and Goliath, behind David, or even that the viewer is a potential target. However, it should be borne in mind that the hunched David measures 190 cm tall, and so towers over most beholders.

Whatever Bernini’s intended relationship between sculpture and viewer, this masterpiece makes clear that David is not alone, either physically or spiritually.

References

Glen, Thomas L. 1996. ‘Rethinking Bernini’s David: Attitude, Moment and the Location of Goliath’, RACAR 23.1/2: 84–92

Hibbard, Howard. 1965. Bernini (Baltimore: Penguin Books)

Riegl, Alois. 1912. Filippo Baldinucci’s Vita des? Geo. Lorenzo Baldinucci mit Ubersetzung und Kommentar (Vienna), trans. and reproduced by E.G. Holt, A Documentary History of Art, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958)

Faith Conquers All

Comparative commentary by Andrea Olsen Lam

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David’s heroic fight against Goliath has endured as a favourite narrative for millennia, becoming a trope for any underdog battling a powerful foe (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell’s 2013 David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants). The varied depictions of David’s victory over Goliath in this exhibition demonstrate the power of perspective not simply when interpreting art, but also when reading Scripture and when facing ‘Goliaths’ in our daily lives. This brief commentary explores how David and Goliath are portrayed rather distinctively in each artwork, resulting in quite disparate responses to Scripture.

The most remarkable aspect of the Byzantine plate is that David and Goliath are depicted as equally-sized opponents, not according to 1 Samuel 17:4’s account of Goliath’s height as ‘six cubits and a span’ (three meters tall). The contemporary viewer might see David as at a tremendous disadvantage, since he is without armour and holds only a slingshot, but David is depicted as a Roman slinger, a type of unarmed or lightly-armed soldier known to disrupt enemy ranks at strategic moments by firing their ballistic stones at high speeds (Peppard 2016: 72–74, fig. 2.9). Slingers had been decisive in the Romans’ defeat of the Persians in the third century. This plate may celebrate (or anticipate) their effectiveness in seventh-century conflicts against the Persians, since Goliath and several of the surrounding troops wear Persian-style armour.

This Byzantine portrayal of David as physically equal to his opponent renders him both militarily and spiritually strong, not as weak or inferior in any respect. David’s lack of armour and calm demeanour can be viewed as a means of emphasizing his incredible faith in God’s protection. His halo further distinguishes the future king as a biblical saint and hero.

By comparison, Francesco Pesellino portrays David as a lithe youth, smaller than the men around him, and approximately half the height of Goliath. The flower-laden landscape forms a tapestry-like background for this romantic re-telling of the story. As an alternative to scholars’ interpretation of the panels as celebrating a Medici wedding, Pesellino’s panels may not depict David as an upstanding political leader (after all, he was anointed in secret; 1 Sam 16:1–13, and later usurped Saul’s throne). On this panel (and its mate, not pictured here) David may instead be interpreted as a prefiguration of Christ, whose virtue and love for the church is a husband’s chief model of love for his bride (Ephesians 5:25–32). In fact, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccacio are among the quattrocento authors who referred to David’s victory over Goliath as proleptic of Christ’s triumph, but also as a biblical characterization of humility overcoming pride (Baskins 1993: 116). Pesellino’s David is non-threatening and his low-conflict victory is a theologically-significant message for a domestic context in which humility prevails.

For Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s David, specific historical context is all but absent. David appears deeply engaged in felling his opponent, seemingly occupying the same space as the artwork’s beholders. One of several striking features of the statue is the fact that Bernini applied his own facial features to his David, according to both Baldinucci and later Domenico Bernini, the sculptor’s son, who reported that Cardinal Barberini (later Pope Urban VIII) himself often held a mirror for Bernini while he worked (Bernini 1713: ch. III, 18–19). The minimal presence of narrative details brings into focus David’s spiritual battle, as Bernini and other commentators, including Ambrose (340–397 CE) conceived it: the fight of virtue against evil (Glen 1996: 90–91). Bernini portrays David as an athlete, but also incorporates his identity as the author of the Psalms through the lyre at his feet. Indeed, Bernini’s David was compared to the sculptor Myron’s (c.450 BCE) ancient diskoboulos (‘discus-thrower’) (Preimesberger 1985: 11–12). We may further identify David as a spiritual athlete who competes not for an Olympian laurel, but for heavenly victory, in keeping with Ambrose’s description of David’s Psalms as ‘a kind of gymnasium open for all souls to use … In that gymnasium, in that stadium of virtue, he can choose the exercises that will train him best to win the victor’s crown’ (Explanatio psalmorum VII, Ps. 1)

Whether dressed as saintly Roman slinger, gentle Florentine youth, or determined spiritual athlete, the Lord defended David and gave him victory. Perhaps we, too, may glance into Bernini’s mirror and see ourselves as courageous Davids, full of faith in action.

References

Baskins, Christelle L. 1993. ‘Donatello’s Bronze “David”: Grillanda, Goliath, Groom?’, Studies in Iconography 15: 113–34

Bernini, Domenico. [1713] 1988. Vita del Cavalier Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (Rome)

Glen, Thomas L. 1996. ‘Rethinking Bernini’s David: Attitude, Moment and the Location of Goliath’, RACAR 23.1/2: 84–92

Peppard, Michael. 2016. The World’s Oldest Church: Bible, Art, and Ritual at Dura-Europos, Syria (New Haven: Yale University Press)

Preimesberger, R. 1985. ‘Themes from Art Theory in the Early Works of Bernini’, in Gianlorenzo Bernini: New Aspects of His Art and Thought, ed. by I. Lavin (Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania State University Press)

Riain, Íde Ní (Trans.). 2000. Ambrose Commentary on Twelve Psalms (Dublin Halcyon Press)

Next exhibition: 1 Samuel 28:3–25