Michelangelo and Bernini: The Art of Battling Giants

This paper compares and contrasts the progressive ingenuity of Michelangelo’s and Bernini’s renderings in marble sculpture of the recurrent mythos of David. Michelangelo’s David honours classical antiquity yet departs to imbue a Renaissance idiom of ‘man as the measure of all things.’ Michelangelo’s sculpture released from stone a thinking man with the fortitude to metamorphose from famed religious hero to Florentine civic political symbol of strength. However, in Baroque Rome, nearly a century later, the Catholic artist Bernini created his David in the climate of religious conflict with the Reformation’s iconoclasm and subsequent backlash of the Counter-Reformation. Reinventing David’s religious idolatry with artistic alchemy, Bernini shifted marble to embody a dramatic theatrical event and in doing so, ingeniously propagandized a religious symbol to mass appeal.