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Donatello's Bronze "David" and "Judith" as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence Author(s): Sarah Blake McHam Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 83, No. 1 (Mar., 2001), pp. 32-47 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177189 Accessed: 27/12/2009 20:26

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Donatello's Bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence

Sarah Blake McHam

For all the individual analyses of Donatello's bronze David and Judith and Holofernes, these sculptures have rarely been considered jointly, despite the fact that they were displayed in coordinated outdoor spaces of the Medici Palace for about

thirty years. I argue here that their iconography was meant to evoke republican themes, well known to the Florentine elite, that the Medici aimed to embrace and co-opt.l The associated

meanings of the David and the Judith and Holofernes were

signaled by their related inscriptions. As I shall demonstrate

by reference to Greek and Roman authors, particularly Pliny the Elder, these two works drew on descriptions of the Athenian statue group called the Tyrannicides, and on the writings of the twelfth-century English theologian John of Salisbury, all well known in fifteenth-century Florence, for the purpose of creating a visual rhetoric insinuating that the Medici were defenders of Florentine liberty. These literary and artistic sources combine with the two sculptures' related size and material to strengthen the likelihood that the David and the Judith and Holofernes were intended as pendants. Together the sculptures conveyed the controversial, self-

serving message that the family's role in Florence was akin to that of venerable Old Testament tyrant slayers and saviors of their people, symbolically inverting the growing chorus of accusations that the Medici had become tyrants who had sucked all real power out of the city's republican institutions.

The Statues' Setting Donatello's bronze sculptures of Judith and Holofernes (Fig. 1) and David (Fig. 2), according to evidence recently uncovered in contemporary sources, stood respectively in the Medici Palace garden and courtyard by 1469, possibly even as early as 1464-66.2 They remained in these adjoining locations until

1495, after the Medici were expelled from Florence in the

previous year.3 We know that the palace was constructed for Cosimo de' Medici, between 1445 and the mid-1450s, but both sculptures are undocumented commissions.4 They were installed in the palace within a decade after 1457, the

approximate date when Cosimo, his two sons, and their families moved into the recently completed residence. The

sculptures' status as two of the earliest freestanding Renais- sance statues makes the uncertainties of their dates and

patronage particularly tantalizing, because these pieces are crucial to the reconstruction of the history of Italian Renais- sance art.5 Nevertheless, their existence in the Medici Palace

courtyard and garden for about thirty years allows them to be studied jointly in the context of their placement within the most public spaces of the palace that served as the de facto seat of Florentine political power. Investigation of the sculp- tures reveals a prime and largely unexplored example of how Cosimo and Piero de' Medici contributed to the creation of a

family imagery in the secular context most closely identified with it, the newly constructed palace on the Via Larga.6

The bronzes were focal points of the two connected open spaces, the courtyard and garden (Fig. 3). The axial arrange- ment of the palace's main entrance and courtyard means that the David, which was raised on a high base at the center of the

courtyard, was visible even from the street when the main

portal of the palace was open.7 Although there is no certainty about the precise position of the Judith and Holofernes in the

garden,8 since the garden was just behind the courtyard, the

sculpture could have been visible from the courtyard if it was situated on the garden-courtyard axis. Nevertheless, as the

courtyard was open to palace visitors and the garden to an invited group, the two statues were readily accessible to the desired audience.9

The family's suites were grouped around the palace's most

striking innovation all'antica, the first colonnaded courtyard of the Renaissance, in which the David was positioned centrally. The courtyard, whose proportions and regular shape determined the impressive symmetry of the palace's plan, established a new type of interior formal space that came to supplant the exterior loggia on the Medici and other Florentine palaces as the site of formal receptions and family rituals. Behind it, the walled garden, with arcaded loggias at its north and south sides, provided a more private outdoor

area, which was sometimes open to guests to the palace and used in conjunction with the central court when magnificent occasions, such as the wedding of Lorenzo de' Medici and Clarice Orsini in 1469, demanded additional space.'0

The Medici family expended considerable attention on the decorative program for the courtyard and garden. Comple- menting the classicizing columns in the courtyard were

sgraffito decoration of garlands and shields decorated with the Medici palle (or balls), as well as a series of roundels above the arcade of the courtyard. These stone roundels, of uncer- tain date and attribution, seem like large-scale sculptures derived from ancient gems and incised precious stones

acquired by the Medici. Perhaps they were intended to remind the visitor of the family's prestigious collection and interest in antiquity.11 There were ancient sculptures flanking the interior portals of the garden, notably, two of Marsyas on either side of the exit to the Via de' Ginori.12

David as a Tyrant Slayer The recent discovery of the inscription once on the David

("The victor is whoever defends the fatherland. God crushes the wrath of an enormous foe. Behold! A boy overcame a

great tyrant. Conquer, o citizens!")'3 seems to calm the con-

troversy as to whether the sculpture indeed represents the

young giant slayer, at least on a primary level.14 The inscrip- tion does not, however, narrow the range of dates for the

sculpture, which different historians have placed as early as about 1428-30 and as late as after 1460.15 Most scholars agree, however, that the Judith and Holofernes probably dates after

DONATELLO'S DAVID AND JUDITH: METAPHORS OF MEDICI RULE 33

1 Donatello,Judith and Holofernes, bronze. Florence, Palazzo Vecchio (photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York)

Donatello's return to Florence from Padua, in 1453. Since the statue was recorded in the garden of the Medici Palace by 1469, possibly as early as 1464, it was most likely executed in the late 1450s or early 1460s and commissioned by Cosimo or Piero de' Medici.16 If the late dating of the David proves

2 Donatello, David, bronze. Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello (photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource)

34 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2001 VOLUME LXXXIII NUMBER 1

3 Attributed to Michelozzo, Medici Palace courtyard, Florence, view toward garden (photo: Alinari/Art Resource)

correct, then it could have been commissioned by the Medici

together with the Judith, but at this point there is insufficient evidence to confirm the theory.

The historical context of the bronze David provides some

necessary background. Although very different in material and style from Donatello's earlier marble David (Fig. 4), it

repeats the theme of David triumphantly standing with one foot on Goliath's decapitated head. Because David's identity as a victorious warrior has become so familiar to us through such later sculptures as Michelangelo's colossal David, we overlook that before Donatello's marble sculpture almost

every representation of David interpreted him in other ways, as a king, prophet, writer of the Psalms, or ancestor of Christ.17

Documents indicate that in 1416 the marble David was transferred from the workshop at the cathedral of Florence and installed in the Palazzo della Signoria before a pattern of heraldic lilies painted expressly to complement it.18 Its site at the seat of government against a backdrop of symbolic lilies, the emblems of Florence's alliance with the Angevin dynasty, argues that the theme was interpreted in political terms.

Supporting evidence was recently found by Maria Monica

Donato, who discovered two manuscript accounts that de- scribe the Palazzo della Signoria in the early fifteenth century. They allude to an inscription, "To those who bravely fight for the fatherland god will offer victory even against the most terrible foes."19 The manuscripts validate H. W. Janson's earlier, unproved speculation that this inscription might have been added to the sculpture by 1416, and that Donatello then recut the figure to emphasize a new political role for David as a defender of Florence by baring his left leg and removing the scroll formerly used to identify David as a prophet.20

The placement of the bronze David in the courtyard of the Medici Palace with an inscription of patriotic exhortation should be seen as a self-conscious allusion to the earlier marble analogue and its inscription. The marble David was at the time still standing in the priors' meeting hall in the Palazzo della Signoria, which made the Medici's identifica- tion with a symbol of the Florentine Republic all the more

potent. The decision to situate an emblem of Florentine

4 Donatello, David, marble. Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello (photo: Alinari/Art Resource)

republican government in their palace could be understood as a sign that the Medici were closely connected to that regime and continued its ideals. Nevertheless, at the same time it

represented an unprecedented appropriation by a single family of a corporate symbol of the state and informed the

cognoscenti that true power resided several hundred meters north of the Palazzo della Signoria.

Judith as a Tyrant Slayer David and Judith are partners in meaning, which provides a rationale for their pairing. Both were Old Testament heroes and traditionally linked as saviors of the Jewish people in

DONATELLO'S DAVID AND JUDITH: METAPHORS OF MEDICI RULE 35

Jewish and Christian imagery (as in an early medieval fresco at the church of S. Maria Antiqua, Rome, or on Lorenzo Ghiberti's East Doors for the Baptistery, where the statuette of

Judith is placed in a niche next to the relief of David Killing Goliath).21 This partially explains their choice for the public spaces of the Medici Palace, but there were additional reasons for linking the two.

Unlike David, Judith had not been politically associated with Florence, but the textual source, the apocryphal Old Testament Book of Judith, certainly lent itself to a political interpretation and was written to inspire Jewish patriotism.22 In the medieval period Jewish and Christian writers alike

interpreted Judith as a moral, religious, and political heroine. In Christian symbolic thought her victory over Holofernes was elaborated as the triumph of virtue, specified variously as

self-control, chastity, or humility, over the vices of licentious- ness and pride. In visual representations of Judith and

Holofernes, which are usually found among manuscript illustrations of cycles of the virtues, she stands powerful over

Holofernes, holding his sword in one hand and his head by the hair in the other. Associations with these virtues meant

thatJudith even came to be regarded as a type of the Virgin and of the Church.23

In the bronze by Donatello, the depiction of Judith and Holofernes continues these traditions. Judith's virtue is indi-

cated by the demure clothing and veil that cover her from head to toe while Holofernes, in contrast, is almost naked.24 His nudity and drunkenness and the cushion on which he is

propped identify Holofernes as a figure of Lust and Licentious-

ness, whereas Judith represents Chastity.25 The medallion

Holofernes wears, which has swung around to his slumping bare back, depicts a galloping horse, symbolic of Pride or

Superbia, the vice traditionally defeated by Humility, repre- sented byJudith.26

Judith's valiant act of decapitating Holofernes is dramati-

cally emphasized by Donatello, who created the first (and

only) representation in monumental sculpture of this mo-

ment. Equally unprecedented is Donatello's narration of the

actual killing. Rather than interpreting the confrontation

betweenJudith and Holofernes in the traditional emblematic

language of Judith standing motionless over the fallen Ho-

lofernes, Donatello for the first time depicted the grisly detail of Judith's delivering a second blow to Holofernes, the one

that results in his decapitation. The canopy she has ripped from Holofernes' bed (and later triumphantly presents in the

Temple atJerusalem) is wound through his hair in her hand and around her upper back and thighs (Figs. 5, 6).27 The visual effect of these features encourages the spectator to circle the sculpture in order to appreciate gradually how the

complex intertwining of the protagonists' bodies connotes their physical intimacy, and finally to confront the psychologi- cal nuances of Judith's expression of horrifying calm and steadfast resolve (Fig. 7). Judith raises Holofernes' scimitar

high over her head and is poised to attack again. Vestiges on the weapon indicate that it was entirely gilded, and so this dramatic fulcrum of the sculpture must have shone in the

garden sunlight at the statue's pinnacle, emphasizing the

impending movement of Judith's arm.28 To ensure a deadly

5 Donatello,Judith, side view (photo: Alinari/Art Resource)

cut, Judith steadies Holofernes' unconscious form by strad-

dling his bare chest, bracing his head against her thigh, standing on his wrist, and grabbing his hair tightly. She has

already opened a huge gash in his neck, and his head is

collapsed unnaturally on his shoulders.

36 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2001 VOLUME LXXXIII NUMBER 1

7 Donatello,Judith, detail: head ofJudith (photo: Alinari/Art Resource)

( i?! The inscription recorded on the base-"Kingdoms fall through luxury [sin], cities rise through virtues. Behold the neck of pride severed by the hand of humility"-underscores the moral meaning of the decapitation.29 The exhortation to the viewer to focus on the physical evidence of the truncated neck is unusual and important (this will be explored later). A second inscription connects its reference to contemporary

_- ,.

~ z , ~-_ *Florence, "The salvation of the state. Piero de' Medici son of Cosimo dedicated this statue of a woman both to liberty and

_:,- _ _or=f ..... ISto fortitude, whereby the citizens with unvanquished and constant heart might return to the republic."30 Together they echo the rallying cry for liberty against the evils of tyrannical rule carved on the base of the David.

Relationship to the Athenian Tyrannicides The Judith and Holofernes and the David evoke references to

tyrannicide well known to the Medici and to other members of the educated elite in Florence through ancient and

contemporary texts. The fifteenth-century audience was famil- iar with accounts of two celebrated instances of tyrannicide in

"_lis;~*- , -the ancient world: the first, the attempted murder of Hippias in Athens, was hailed as establishing democracy in the west; the second, the assassination of Julius Caesar in Rome, was a

', > .~subject of continuing controversy. Considered a treacherous

murder by some-for example, Dante31-others, like Boccac- cio, viewed Caesar's killing by Brutus and Cassius as a

Donatello,Judith, back view (photo: Alinari/Art Resource) legitimate tyrannicide.32 6

.' -

I "

DONATELLO'S DAVID AND JUDITH: METAPHORS OF MEDICI RULE 37

8 Tyrannicide: Harmodios, Roman copy in marble of original Greek bronze. Naples, Museo Nazionale (photo: Alinari/Art Resource)

The antityrannical inscriptions on the base of both sculp- tures by Donatello suggest a link to these renowned historical

episodes and to the statue that became the most famous monument to tyrannicide in the West. The Tyrannicides (Figs. 8, 9), the monumental bronze group of Harmodios and

9 Tyrannicide: Aristogeiton, Roman copy in marble of original Greek bronze. Naples, Museo Nazionale (photo: Alinari/Art Resource)

Aristogeiton, heroically nude and advancing forward, ready to strike, was erected at public expense in the Agora to honor them for overthrowing the tyrannical regime that led to the establishment of democracy in Athens (despite the fact that

they botched the attempt).33 The pair was given full honors as

heroes, and their statue was considered such a symbol of the

city and its liberty that the Athenians legislated that no other

sculptures could be erected near it in the Agora. When the Persians conquered Athens in 480-79 B.C.E., they acknowl-

edged the statue's symbolic importance to the city by carrying it off as a trophy. The Athenians immediately commissioned a

replacement to stand in the Agora, and when the original Tyrannicides group was recaptured more than a century later and returned to Athens, it was placed alongside the second version of the theme in Athens's civic center.34

Only after Athens had been conquered by Rome was an

exception made to the edict honoring the Athenian tyranni- cides by solitary prominence in the Agora: in 44 B.C.E. Athenian citizens voted to erect statues of Brutus and Cassius next to the Tyrannicides, thereby paying tribute to their slaying of Caesar in the same terms as the commemoration of Harmodios and Aristogeiton.35 General descriptions of the

sculpture of Harmodios and Aristogeiton survived into the Renaissance in writings by authors such as Pliny, Pausanias, and Philostratus. As one or more copies of each of these

38 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2001 VOLUME LXXXIII NUMBER 1

relevant ancient author's texts were housed in the S. Marco

Library in the fifteenth century, the monument must have been known to the Medici family.36

Pliny's Natural History, in one of its most detailed accounts of any single Greek or Roman work of art, provided the fullest

commentary. Pliny called the heroes and their sculpture symbols of Athenian democracy. He suggested that the

Tyrannicides were among the first recorded examples of bronze sculpture, thus making them a landmark in the invention of that artistic form.37 He further recounted how the brave deeds of Harmodios and Aristogeiton were immor- talized by an inscription on the sculpture's base. Pliny specified that their portrait sculpture was installed at public expense in the Agora so that the feats of the tyrant slayers might live in the memory of Athenian citizens. He claimed the precedent started the fashion in many municipalities of

decorating public squares with statues of heroes atop bases inscribed with their identities. He related the precedent to a

subsequent practice of installing statuary in the private spaces of residences.38 Pliny embellished the story of the tyranni- cides with dramatic human interest by recounting the ancil-

lary episode of the harlot Laena, who was tortured to death rather than reveal the identities of Harmodios and Aristo-

geiton, and of the monument of a tongueless lion erected in her honor by the grateful Athenian state.39 Ghiberti summa- rized Pliny's version of the story in his Commentarii, and Leon Battista Alberti's treatise on architecture repeated all major features of Pliny's description.40

In its own right, the epigram on the Athenian statue's base was just as celebrated as the sculptures. Attributed to the famous poet Simonides, it extolled the tyrannicides and their liberation of Athens with the words, "A marvelous great light shone upon Athens when Aristogeiton and Harmodios slew

Hipparchus."41 Several drinking songs (scholia) derived from the inscription remained popular for centuries and were used to encourage patriotic emulation of the heroism of the tyran- nicides.42 The poetic inscriptions on the bases of the sculp- tures by Donatello, which distinguish the figures as exempla by invoking spectators' attention to their feats, may be

inspired by that precedent.43 The statue group was widely copied in later Greek and

Roman art; often, as in the case of the Brutus and Cassius statues mentioned above, imitations of the Tyrannicides were motivated by the goal of rallying patriotism in response to some threat to political freedom.44 There are a number of extant monumental variants, and renditions proliferated in

copies and in versions on coins and vases and in relief

sculpture. Characteristic aspects of the figures' gestures and

poses were transferred to other heroes, such as Theseus, as a

sign of their identification with the political import of the

Tyrannicides.45 The installation of the David and the Judith in the courtyard

and garden of the Medici Palace recalls Pliny's allusion to the fashion of erecting sculptures in private residences that derived from the fame of the Tyrannicides. The sequence of these spaces in the palace suggests the atrium and peristyle of Roman houses, basic features of domestic architecture empha- sized by the Roman writer Vitruvius.46 In his treatise on architecture completed by 1452, Alberti elaborated on Vitru-

vius's description and connected these spaces to the sort of

public civic area where the Tyrannicides had been installed:

... the principal member of the whole building is that which I shall call the courtyard with its portico, to which all the other members must correspond, as being in a manner a public marketplace to the whole house.... (5.17)47

Places of public reception in houses ought to be like

squares and other open spaces in cities ... in the center and most public place where all the other members may readily meet. (5.2)48

The incriptions of the Judith and Holofernes were later effaced and then recarved with pointed reference to the reinstated

republic when it was transferred from the Medici Palace to the ringhiera, or rostrum once attached to the west side of the Palazzo della Signoria. This history suggests the intensity of the statue's political associations and may reflect awareness of how the original Tyrannicides were carted off as spoils by the victorious Persians to be reinstalled as a symbol of triumph in the public space of their capital.49

The sculptures in the Medici Palace repeat features of the Athenian sculpture reflected in works of art and described in the literary sources. Like it, they represent tyrannicide through the medium of large-scale bronze sculpture of figures in dramatic action. The correspondences between the David, a bronze freestanding nude in the tradition of Greek heroic

statues, situated in the courtyard of the Medici Palace, the

analogous space in private residences to the public square of

cities, reinforce the association. Judith's gestures of raising the sword over her head with one arm while thrusting forward her other, drapery-covered arm to grab the hair of her victim conflate the poses of the Athenians' arms as had the gestures of earlier heroes like Theseus and may reflect a limited

knowledge of the Tyrannicides's actual physical appearance, pieced together from literary references and imitations of the

group in the visual arts, or else fortuitously inspired by their laconic evidence into a partial resemblance.

Historical Influence of John of Salisbury's Policraticus Another equally famous precedent regarding tyrannicide apparently influenced the fifteenth-century sculptures. Dona- tello's unprecedented emphasis on the physical acts of mur- der and decapitation seems to reflect the contemporary impact ofJohn of Salisbury's Policraticus. The Policraticus was a treatise about government written in the twelfth century by an

English theologian who became bishop of Chartres. It stood at the center of impassioned debate throughout Europe three hundred years later because it provided the most notable theoretical justification for the legitimacy of tyrannicide written by a Christian authority.50 The Policraticus had long enjoyed a special status as the earliest elaborate medieval

exposition of political theory. Since it was based extensively on the Bible and patristic literature, the Policraticus was construed to represent the viewpoint of the Church. The treatise played a prominent role throughout the late Middle

Ages and Renaissance in the popular genre of literature known as the "Mirror of Princes," that is, treatises written to instruct rulers.51John of Salisbury's theories about the nature

DONATELLO'S DAVID AND JUDITH: METAPHORS OF MEDICI RULE 39

of the state directly engaged issues of political legitimacy and

made the Policraticus influential on legal theory, philosophy, and political thought.52 For more than a century the treatise was considered the most authoritative work on government throughout Europe; it yielded its unchallenged supremacy to Thomas Aquinas, who drew extensively onJohn of Salisbury's theories and increased their circulation.53 After the mid- thirteenth century, the constitutional and political problems of legitimacy grew ever more urgent as new governmental units coalesced, and more attention focused on the Policrati- cus. Its influence was so significant in Italian legal and

political circles that a fourteenth-century Bolognese jurist wrote a reference index to its contents.54

The Policraticus became widely known as its many moraliz-

ing stories proved a popular source for the teaching exempla cited by friars in their sermons. Finally, because the treatise drew extensively on ancient authors, interest in it was further stimulated by the incorporation of pagan classical literature into the curriculum of universities.55 In some circles the

authority of the Policraticus was further enhanced by the

misconception that the title represented the author's name and he was Greek.56 An excerpt, which John of Salisbury called the "Institutio Traiani" and claimed was written by Plutarch, was widely diffused independently. Regarded as a

major ancient source on tyranny and tyrannicide, it was the

only text attributed to Plutarch known and taught during the fourteenth and much of the fifteenth century.57

John of Salisbury's discussions of tyranny and tyrannicide had enduring popularity in Italy for additional reasons. He

provided information and a theoretical context with which to assess the rulers of ancient Greece and Rome, making his work important to authors like Petrarch and Boccaccio. Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae contains several dia-

logues on the nature of tyranny.58 In the De casibus virorum

illustrium, published in 1371, Boccaccio devoted several chap- ters to tyrants in the ancient world.

But John's commentary had more specific implications in

Florence, one of the few Italian cities that remained a

republic by the end of the fourteenth century, after most other Italian communes had evolved into semimonarchical or even tyrannical governments. Florentine claims for the city's foundation during the Roman Republic and other associa- tions to that venerable precedent were mainstays of civic pride and propaganda. This made the assassination of Caesar and

arguments about whether tyrannicide was justified topics of

particular significance. The Policraticus proposed the legitimacy of tyrannicide in a

series of explicit arguments unparalleled in Western thought,59 with a key book of the treatise headed "That by the authority of the divine book it is lawful and glorious to kill public tyrants, so long as the murderer is not obligated to the tyrant by fealty...."60 When the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati wrote a treatise called De tyranno in 1400, he naturally drew on the Policraticus. Salutati's text is the first by a major Italian political figure to focus on tyrannical government and the legitimacy of tyrannicide. His objective in writing it was to defend the reputation of Dante, who, rather than according immortality to Cassius and Brutus as tyrannicides, had deemed them murderers and relegated them to the lowest circles of the Inferno.61 Unlike John of Salisbury, who had considered

Caesar a tyrant, Salutati argued that Caesar was a benevolent

despot. Therefore, according to Salutati, Caesar's assassina- tion was not a legitimate tyrannicide, and Dante was right to

put Cassius and Brutus in Hell.62 Not surprisingly, the numerous assassinations of contempo-

rary political leaders in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe and the tenuous hold on power of many more kept attention focused on the Policraticus's justifications of tyranni- cide. In 1407 the murder of Louis, duke of Orleans, brother of Charles VI, king of France, by John the Fearless, duke of

Burgundy, thrustJohn of Salisbury's theories again into the

spotlight. In a move that galvanized all of Europe, the duke of

Burgundy denied that he had committed any crime, thereby skirting the obvious charge that the killing enhanced his own chance of succeeding to the throne of France. He contended

that, as a loyal servant of the crown, he had been honor- bound to rid the country of a detestable tyrant who had

perverted French royal institutions. His stance had grave theoretical consequences for rulers anywhere in Europe and direct ramifications not only for France and Burgundy but also for England and Italy. Henry V of England soon thereaf- ter married Catherine, the daughter of the French king, and the duke of Orleans left as his widow Valentina Visconti, the

daughter of the duke of Milan. To argue his case, the duke of Burgundy hired Jean Petit, a

distinguished theologian at the University of Paris, who

argued on the duke's behalf that the murder of a tyrant was the praiseworthy obligation of a good Christian citizen. To buttress his stance that the Church sanctioned such assassina-

tions, Petit drew on Thomas Aquinas and other theologians, but the defense rested onJohn of Salisbury's explicit theories about the legitimacy of tyrannicide. Petit presented the

position in a series of tracts entitled Justificatio Ducis Burgun- diae.63

The outraged son of the assassinated duke of Orl6ans demanded that their validity be judged by a Council of the

Faith, attended by doctors and masters of the University of Paris. This distinguished group vehemently debated the issues

throughout 1413 and 1414. The eminent theologian Jean Gerson represented the duke of Orl&ans's position that his father had been unjustly murdered.64 In 1414, the synod condemned the ideas of Jean Petit and required that all

copies of the Justificatio be burned.65 Nevertheless, at the

Burgundian court it was preserved as a precious document,

recopied, and over the course of the century incorporated into the manuscript and ultimately the printed histories of

Burgundy and of France.66 In response to the synod's decision, the duke of Burgundy

brought his case before John XXIII, the claimant to the papacy not supported by the king of France. John first assigned a committee of Italian cardinals to make a ruling; he named them because of their experience, as Italians, with political assassinations.67 John XXIII subsequently decided that the matter should be put before the full-scale church council at Constance. There it was debated at great length, with Gerson

again representing the position of the family of Louis of Orleans.68 Nevertheless, the Council of Constance broke up in 1418 without ruling against the duke of Burgundy.69

Burgundian partisans immediately retook control of the

40 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2001 VOLUME LXXXIII NUMBER 1

royal government in Paris. Soon thereafter the University of Paris published a long letter excusing itself for the Council of the Faith's decision, on the basis that hardly any impressive masters of theology remained in Paris during its tenure. Royal letters were composed specifically disavowing the work of Gerson. The assassination of the duke of Burgundy in 1419 made his culpability a moot point but intensified the contro-

versy about the succession of power in France and Burgundy, as well as the theoretical basis of legitimate government and citizens' rights to take action against unlawful rulers.

Practical repercussions continued to be felt in Italy. Charles of Orleans, the son ofValentina Visconti and the assassinated

duke, laid claim to various territories in northwestern Italy, including the duchy of Milan. Charles died in 1465, but the title of the house of Orleans to Milan did not. The French invasion of Italy at the end of the fifteenth century was mounted to enforce it. During the fifteenth century, other

attempts to overthrow existing Italian governments sprang from native soil. The most significant occurred in Rome, Milan, and Florence; one plot achieved its goal of killing a head of state.70 In 1476 the Olgiati Conspiracy in Milan resulted in the murder of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza.71Just a

couple of years later the Pazzi Conspiracy in Florence suc- ceeded in the assassination of Giovanni de' Medici, although his brother, Lorenzo, the head of state, escaped. Unlike their Milanese counterparts, the Pazzi conspirators did not justify their deeds by rhetorical allusions to legitimate tyrannicide, but other Florentines did so for them. In 1478-79, Alamanno Rinuccini wrote the treatise "De libertate," in which he likened the Pazzi conspirators to the heroic teams of Harmo- dios and Aristogeiton, Cassius and Brutus, and the Milanese

conspirators.72 More than recurrent political crises, killings, and problems

of succession kept alive the themes with which John of

Salisbury had grappled. Riccardo Fubini has pointed out that the theological and political interpretation of a state's legiti- mate authority-the fundamental question left unresolved at Paris and Constance-festered in Florentine fifteenth-

century political thought and led to successive crises such as the rebellion against Piero de' Medici in 1466 and the Pazzi

Conspiracy. As he noted, the editorial debates leading to a new Latin edition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in 1463 demonstrate the continuing importance of the controversy.73

The Sculptures in Relation to the Policraticus Let us now return to the focus of this essay and examine how the two sculptures by Donatello relate to John of Salisbury's discussions of the state and tyrannicide. To begin with the obvious: they both depict tyrannicides. Judith's killing of Holofernes is made unprecedentedly dramatic. In addition to

being the first monumental depiction of the episode, it is rendered as a freestanding sculpture whose physical tangibil- ity heightens the explicit horror of the freeze-frame rendition of a murder in progress. That the tyrannicides are legitimate and morallyjustified is underscored by the inscriptions on the David and the Judith.

The graphic aspect ofJudith's pause between two blows as she decapitates Holofernes and the inscription's focus on the severed head relate to the peculiarly precise anatomical characterization that is John of Salisbury's original contribu-

tion to the long-standing analogy between the body and the state. He made clear that the prince is the state's head, and that it ineluctably followed that the tyrant, or prince who

misruled, must be killed so that the head is severed from the

body.74 Although he credited Plutarch's "Institutio Traiani" as his authority, John of Salisbury seems to have invented the details of the metaphor himself.75

John contended that tyrannicide was a duty if it set people free for the service of God.76 In support of his position, he cited various examples of the oppression of the Jews in the Old Testament and their deliverance by the slayers of these

tyrants; by far the most important savior wasJudith, who killed the general of an army threatening her people.77 In the same

chapter,John extolled David as a counter example. According to John's philosophy of fealty, David was bound by oath as a

subject Saul, and so unlike Judith, who owed no allegiance to

Holofernes, David could not rightfully murder Saul, even

though he was a tyrant. John argued that David's patient, passive resistance and decision to leave Saul's fate to God

represented the moral course of action in such cases.78

Nevertheless, John realized that not all tyrants could be

peaceably overcome and offered specific advice about depos- ing them by force. According toJohn, the most expedient way to destroy tyrants was to beseech God's retribution, but he

explicitly sanctioned human dissimulation and treachery when they served the cause.79 In this regard, his most

prominent case was again that of Judith, whose beauty and charms were enhanced by God,John tells us, so that she could entice Holofernes into a drunken stupor and kill him:

Let me prove by another story that it is just for public tyrants to be killed and the people thus set free for the service of God. This story shows that even priests of God

repute the killing of tyrants as a pious act, and if it appears to wear the semblance of treachery, they say it is conse- crated to the Lord by a holy mystery. Thus Holofernes fell a victim not to the valor of the enemy but to his own vices by means of a sword in the hands of a woman; and he who had been terrible to strong men was vanquished by luxury and

drink, and slain by a woman. Nor would the woman have

gained access to the tyrant had she not piously dissimu- lated her hostile intention for that is not treachery which serves the cause of the faith.... For this is shown by her words ... "Bring to pass, Lord," she prayed, "that by his own sword his pride may be cut off, and that he may be

caught in the net of his own eyes turned upon me.... Grant to me constancy of soul that I may despise him, and fortitude that I may destroy him. For it will be a glorious monument of Thy name when the hand of a woman strike him down." . . . she who had not come to wanton, used a borrowed wantonness as the instrument of her devotion and courage.80

Donatello's bronze representsJudith as chaste and humble,

although the sensuous implications of her encounter with Holofernes and the ways in which she guilefully ensnared him are amply suggested by their intimate physical positioning: she stands on his wrist and straddles his chest.81

The topicality of John's treatise helps to explain the commission for the first monumental, three-dimensional

DONATELLO'S DAVID AND JUDITH: METAPHORS OF MEDICI RULE 41

statue of the story of Judith and Holofernes. The brutal

decapitation reflects his citation of Holofernes' murder as the

prime example of justified killing of an overlord who dis-

obeyed God's laws. John singled out the sword as the suitable

agent of retribution against a ruler who unlawfully used it

against his people: "For whosoever takes up the sword deserves to perish by the sword."82 The unprecedented portrayal of a decapitation in progress is the physical embodi- ment ofJohn's theory about the actual separation of the head from the body politic, that is, the severing of the tyrant from his state in a whollyjustifiable murder.83 Even though David's

killing of Goliath was not cited as an example of tyrannicide in the Policraticus, Donatello's depiction of the boy standing victorious, sword in hand, over the decapitated head of Goliath easily relates toJohn's ideas. Like Holofernes, Goliath was the major warrior of an army menacing the Jews. Holofernes' killing by a woman and Goliath's death at the hands of a boy could only have been accomplished with God's

help. Despite the fact that David killed Goliath with a stone, the sword, the meansJohn recommended to slay a tyrant, and Goliath's severed head are emphasized. The inscription originally on the statue's base and the statue's inevitable association with the nearby Judith and Holofernes reinforced the appropriateness of interpreting the killing of Goliath as another illustration ofjustified tyrannicide.

The David and the Judith and Holofernes, sculptural center-

pieces of the two most public spaces in the Medici Palace, thus seem to have been coordinated in a program that was calculated to advertise to invited guests that Cosimo and his

family were protectors of liberty-in a period when that was

very much in question and in need of corroboration. Their control of Florence was sufficiently threatened that in 1458 Cosimo secretly consulted with Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan about sending troops to Florence should conspiring against the regime explode into fighting. Cosimo next master- minded a series of changes that weakened traditional republi- can governmental structures. These were confirmed by a sham parlamento, in which the intimidated citizenry sur- rounded by armed soldiers voted to consolidate the family's hold on power. Cosimo and then Piero ruled for the next

eight years, taking harsh measures to suppress any opposition. In this period they had a great need to deflect charges of

tyranny from themselves. Donatello's statues conveyed that

message powerfully by suggesting instead that the Medici

family should be seen in the flattering light of celebrators, even preservers, of Florentine liberty against any threat, a

self-serving political strategy that many Florentines would have considered outrageous.84

Related Aspects of the Courtyard's Decoration This reading of the statues is reinforced by their thematic and formal links to the other aspects of the decoration of the

garden and the courtyard. Two ancient statues of Marsyas, restored in the fifteenth century, flanked the doors leading from the garden into the Via de' Ginori. One, now lost, represented a seated Marsyas prior to his torture.85 The other, depicting the torture of Marsyas, is presently in the Uffizi (Fig. 10). Recently Francesco Caglioti convincingly reattributed its restoration to Mino da Fiesole.86 He also argued that these two statues were included in the garden because the theme of

10 Marsyas, Roman sculpture with restorations attributed to Mino da Fiesole, marble. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi (photo: Alinari)

Marsyas could be understood as representing liberty. In

support of that argument, he cited an unpublished commen-

tary by Giovanni Nesi on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which

42 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2001 VOLUME LXXXIII NUMBER 1

11 Attributed to Donatello, roundel of Centaur, stone. Medici 13 Attributed to Donatello, roundel of Triumph ofBacchus, Palace courtyard (photo: Alinari/Art Resource) stone. Medici Palace courtyard (photo: Alinari/Art Resource)

12 Attributed to Donatello, roundel of Daedalus and Icarus, stone. Medici Palace courtyard (photo: Alinari/Art Resource)

Nesi directed to the young Piero de' Medici, the son of Lorenzo.87

The roundels of the courtyard's upper walls, which may have been designed by Donatello, further develop the mean-

ing of the program.88 One depicts centaurs (Fig. 11), cited by Dante as incapable of successfully governing because of their

supposed fault of pride.89 They therefore connect to the statues' allusions to prideful tyrants overcome by virtuous deliverers who restore liberty to their people. Another roun-

del represents Daedalus and Icarus (Fig. 12). The proud Icarus is posed nude atop a high pedestal, recalling promi- nent features of the statue of David below. According to Francis Ames-Lewis, this similarity also establishes a link between the interpretation of the David and the roundel. He sees them together representing the results of contemplation of truth in a Neoplatonic sense, as the soul rises from the terrestrial state to the divine state personified by Icarus.90 In this light, the statue and roundel together could be seen as

validating the "truth" of the cycle. A third roundel, often considered to represent the Triumph of Eros, depicts a scene

very close to that on Goliath's helmet, relating the roundel to the statue by Donatello (Fig. 13). Both the helmet decoration and the roundel have been identified in this way because of their compositional connections with a sardonyx cameo traceable in the fifteenth century to the collections of Pietro

Barbo, and now in Naples.91 However, art historians had not taken into account that the gem was also identified as a

Triumph of Bacchus, an interpretation applied by Patricia Ann Leach to the roundel and helmet decoration both.92 She

argued that in this context the triumph suggested not only a Christian meaning of salvation but also a political sense of

liberty, because of Boccaccio's description of how Bacchus or Liber brought liberty (libertas) to mankind.93 Wendy Stedman Sheard extended this line of interpretation by noting that Bacchus can be considered a god of military triumph and as such personifies the connection of peace and prosperity with the reign of a legitimate ruler, in this case the Medici.94

Artistic Patronage Converted to Political Power The interpretation of the statues and courtyard decoration accords with the claims of humanists seeking Cosimo's favor, such as the Sienese Francesco Patrizi. In his "Ad Cosimum Medicem virum excellentissimum," written about 1434, Pa-

DONATELLO'S DAVID AND JUDITH: METAPHORS OF MEDICI RULE 43

trizi flattered Cosimo as a new Brutus for his symbolic slaying of the tyrant Rinaldo degli Albizzi, or Caesar:

Like Brutus, he, fearing for the Roman flower of Freedom, struck, and broke the tyrant's power.95

Not many humanists adopted this rhetoric. But it served the Medici well to create an imagery that advertised the family's stance as defenders of Florence. The prominent precedent of Donatello's marble David in the Palazzo della Signoria en- sured that the bronze David would have been immediately associated with the cause of Florentine liberty and the defeat of enemies of the state. By erecting Donatello's bronze David in the public space of their palace's courtyard and inscribing its base with an antityrannical message, the Medici were

usurping this symbol of the republic and inverting its mean-

ing-making themselves, not the republic, tyrant slayers like David. AlthoughJudith was a new symbol to Florence,John of

Salisbury's citation of her as a paradigmatic tyrannicide made the Old Testament heroine a second exemplar. The bronze

sculpture's unprecedented stress on Judith's encounter with Holofernes as a dramatic narrative of murder and decapita- tion derives from John's famous metaphor of the tyrannical prince as the head of the body politic who must be sundered from it by decapitation.

The multiple connections among the Donatello sculptures, John of Salisbury's Policraticus, and the famed ancient statues of the Tyrannicides reveal another way in which Cosimo and Piero created their family imagery, knowledgeably converting to their own aggrandizement venerable historical precedents in addressing a simmering contemporary controversy. By so

doing, the Medici manipulated republican imagery to estab- lish the family's political propaganda, here subverting the

charge of tyranny often leveled against them to their own

purpose.96 The message was subtle and coexisted with more obvious and conventional interpretations of David andJudith as Old Testament heroes honored by Christian tradition. Scholars have demonstrated many examples of how the Medici employed a strategy of commissioning works of art that veiled their political thrust in a context of acceptable religious and moral themes. The program discussed here

provides another instance of the family's carefully calculated and sophisticated use of artistic patronage to further its goal of maintaining power in Florence.97

Sarah Blake McHam, professor of art history, Rutgers University, edited Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture and contributed an essay on public sculpture to the volume. She is also the author of The Chapel of St. Anthony at the Santo and the Development of Venetian Renaissance Sculpture [Department of Art History, Voorhees Hall, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08901-

1248, mcham @rci.rutgers.edu].

Frequently Cited Sources

Ames-Lewis, Francis, 1989, "Donatello's Bronze David and the Palazzo Medici

Courtyard," Renaissance Studies 3, no. 3: 235-51.

, ed., 1992, Cosimo "il Vecchio"de'Medici 1389-1464 (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Coville, Alfred, Jean Petit: La question du tyrannicide au commencement du xve siecle

(Paris: Auguste Picard, 1932). Hyman, Isabelle, Fifteenth Century Florentine Studies: The Palazzo Medici and a

Ledgerfor the Church of San Lorenzo (New York: Garland, 1977). Janson, H. W., The Sculpture of Donatello, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1979). The Statesman's Book of John of Salisbury, Being the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Books,

and Selections from the Seventh and Eighth Books of the Policraticus, trans. and ed.

John Dickinson (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927). Ullman, Berthold Louis, and Philip A. Stadter, The Public Library of Renaissance

Florence: Niccoli Niccoli, Cosimo de' Medici and the Library of San Marco, Medievo e umanesimo, vol. 10 (Padua: Antenore, 1972).

Notes

Some of this research was first presented at the Wesleyan Renaissance Seminar in December 1994 and later revised in a paper given at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1996. I would like to thank the participants at both for their comments. I want to acknowledge especially the assistance of Professor Susan McKillop, who first brought to my attention John of Salisbury's reference to Judith in the Policraticus and for encouraging my research. I would also like to thank Professors Roger Crum, Tod Marder,John Paoletti, and Debra Pincus for their many helpful comments about earlier drafts of this essay, and Professors Jocelyn Penny Small and John Kenfield for their bibliographic assistance. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.

1. This interpretation was first advanced by Bonnie A. Bennett and David G. Wilkins, Donatello (Oxford: Phaidon, 1984), 85. Roger Crum, "Retrospection and Response: The Medici Palace in the Service of the Medici, c. 1420-1469," Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1992, considered the sculptures and paintings at the palace together, arguing that they should be seen as celebrations of the victory of humility over pride and of concord over discord. Crum argued more specifically that the David served to connect the Medici to a general message of liberty and antityranny in an article that he brought to my attention after reading an earlier draft of this essay; see his "Donatello's Bronze David and the Question of Foreign vs. Domestic Tyranny," Renaissance Studies 10, no. 4 (Dec. 1996): 440-50. I thank him for his comments and the citation. I believe that the David and the Judith share this meaning and suggest in this essay literary and artistic sources that support the argument.

2. Christine M. Sperling, "Donatello's Bronze 'David' and the Demands of Medici Politics," Burlington Magazine 134 (1992): 218-24, published a manu- script she discovered in the Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, which records an inscription for the David as well as for the Judith and Holofernes and specifies that the Judith and Holofernes was located in the garden of the palace. Sperling argued that the manuscript could be dated between 1466 and 1469, and thus offered the earliest terminus ante quem for the installation of the Judith and Holofernes there. Sperling is the first scholar to analyze these points in relation to Donatello's sculptures. However, she was unaware that Paul Oskar Kristeller, IterItalicum, 2d ed. (London: Warburg Institute, 1967), 115, had earlier noted the citation in another manuscript in the Biblioteca Corsini, Rome, and that Cecil Grayson, "Poesie latine di Gentile Becchi in un codice bodleiano," in Studi offerti a Roberto Ridolfi, ed. Berta Maracchi Biagiarelli and Dennis E. Rhodes (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1973), 285-303, had published still another version of it that is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Grayson's demonstration that the manuscript was written by Gentile Becchi negates Sperling's attempt to argue that Filelfo was its author and, on that basis, date the David ca. 1430. Her other arguments, that the sculpture was commissioned in response to the Milanese threat to Florence at that time and that it relates in style to other sculptures by Donatello in the late 1420s and early 1430s, are taken from H. W. Janson, "La signification politique du David en bronze de Donatello," Revue de l'Art 39 (1978): 33-38, and are inconclusive. Crum, 1996 (as in n. 1), makes a more convincing case that, rather than alluding to a single threat of tyrannical aggression, the Medici disingenuously intended the David to suggest their defense of Florence from all danger of foreign or domestic tyranny, despite the reality that many considered their own rule tyrannical.

Following Sperling's article, Francesco Caglioti, "Donatello, i Medici e Gentile de' Becchi: Un po' d'ordine intorno alla 'Giuditta' (e al 'David') di Via Larga," pt. 1, Prospettiva 75-76 (July-Oct. 1994): 14-22, published several more versions of the 15th-century manuscript citation of the inscriptions on the David and on the Judith. As Caglioti noted, a date as early as 1464 is suggested by the context in which the record is found, a letter of condolence on Cosimo de' Medici's death (1464) written to his son Piero on Aug. 5, 1464. I thank Professor Caglioti for sending me a copy of this article and its sequels.

3. Luca Landucci, Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516, ed. Iodoco Del Badia (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1883), 121.

4. On the palace's architecture, see Hyman; and Brenda Preyer, "L'architettura del Palazzo Medici," in II Palazzo Medici-Riccardi di Firenze, ed. Giovanni Cherubini and Giovanni Fanelli (Florence: Giunti, 1990), 58-75.

44 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2001 VOLUME LXXXIII NUMBER 1

5. Other noteworthy features include the total nudity of the David, the conception of the Judith and Holofernes as a group in dramatic action, and the installation of life-size statues in a residential setting. To my knowledge, they are the first Renaissance examples of these phenomena.

Caglioti (as in n. 2), 19-49, made the most recent contribution to the controversy about the date and patron of the Judith and Holofernes. He argued that Donatello began the commission for Cosimo by 1457, put it aside during his sojourn in Siena (1457-61), and then completed the sculpture after his return to Florence and before his death in 1466. Previous historians divided into two camps about the commission, some followingJanson, 202-5, who, on the basis of Milanesi's reading of an elliptical reference regarding the purchase of bronze in Siena for Donatello in a document of 1457 (Siena, Archivio dell'Opera Metropolitana), contended that Donatello began the Judith and Holofernes as a civic commission for that city and then completed it for the Medici. Others, led by Volker Herzner, who retranscribed the document and read it differently, argued that it alluded to another commis- sion entirely, namely, a reliquary bust of Saint Giuletta ("Donatello in Siena," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 15 [1971]: 178-85; and "Die 'Judith' der Medici," ZeitschriftfirKunstgeschichte43 [1980]: 159-63), and that the Judith and Holofernes commission had nothing to do with Siena, but was instead a Medici commission.

6. See Crum, 1992 (as in n. 1), for a comprehensive analysis of the palace. The frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Medici Palace Chapel have received much attention in regard to their political meaning; see the recent discussion and bibliography in Rab Hatfield, "Cosimo de' Medici and His Chapel," in Ames-Lewis, 1992, 221-44; Diane Cole Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 81-119, 219-20; and Roger Crum, "Roberto Martelli, the Council of Florence, and the Medici Palace Chapel," Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 59 (1996): 403-17.

7. The David stood at the center of the courtyard, which is on axis with the main portal of the palace and visible from the street. Its original base by Desiderio da Settignano has been lost, but it was described by Giorgio Vasari. Speculation has centered on its appearance and height, and how these affected spectators' view of the David from ground level in the courtyard and from the windows of the piano nobile of the palace. On these issues, see Ames-Lewis, 1989, 235-51, who first presented a reconstruction of the base; and Francesco Caglioti, "Donatello, i Medici e Gentile de' Becchi .... ," pt. 3, Prospettiva 80 (Oct. 1995): 15-58, where a more convincing reconstruction is offered.

8. Ames-Lewis, 1989, 240-41, first analyzed the uncertainties surrounding the original placement of the statue in the garden. Previously, scholars had assumed that it was located on axis with the David in the courtyard; see Hyman, 195. Recently, Francesco Caglioti, "Donatello, i Medici e Gentile de' Bec- chi....," pt. 2, Prospettiva 78 (Apr. 1995): 22-55, expanded Ames-Lewis's arguments, contending that the Judith and Holofernes was located at the north end of the garden.

Caglioti also challenged the long-standing interpretation that the Judith and Holofernes functioned as a fountain in the Medici garden. He argued that the base of the statue, which had been considered a replacement when the group was transferred to the Palazzo della Signoria, had been its base in the garden of the Medici Palace. In addition, he contended that the location of the Judith and Holofernes in that garden was not on axis with the David but instead at the north end of the garden and that a fountain without statuary stood on the site on axis with the David that historians had traditionally assigned to the Judith and Holofernes. See his diagram, 31.

The recent restoration of the Judith and Holofernes revealed that the supposed waterspouts in the center of each relief of the three-sided base had never been opened, and confirmed the observation occasionally made earlier that the openings at the corners of the cushion on which Holofernes is propped could have been plugged with now-lost bronze tassels, rather than serving as waterspouts; see Antonio Natali, "Exemplum salutatis publicae," in Donatello e il restauro della Giuditta, ed. Loretta Dolcini (Florence: Centro Di, 1988), 27.

9. On Cosimo's quasiofficial use of his palace as the site of government consultations, see Nicolai Rubinstein, "Cosimo optimus cives," in Ames-Lewis, 1992, 13, where the acerbic remarks of Giovanni Cavalcanti's Istoriefiorentine, ed. Guido di Pino (Milan: A. Martello, 1944), 20, are quoted: "... the governing of the city took place more at dinners and in private studies than at the town hall." The Terze rime, a panegyric written ca. 1459, recounted how Cosimo and Piero often entertained visitors at the palace; see Rab Hatfield, "Some Unknown Descriptions of the Medici Palace in 1459," Art Bulletin 52 (1970): 240, where fol. 26v is discussed.

10. On the wedding, see Hyman, 167. It was also available to receive guests after dinners, as for example when Galeazzo Maria Sforza visited in 1459, described in the Terze rime, 41v, in Hatfield (as in n. 9), 236; and in a letter in idem (as in n. 6), 227.

11. On these stone roundels, see Ursula Wester and Erika Simon, "Die Reliefmedallions im Hofe des Palazzo Medici zu Florenz," Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 7 (1965): 15-91; on their relation to gems in the Medici collections, see Gennaro Pesce, "Gemme medicee del Museo Nazionale di Napoli," Rivista del Reale Istituto d 'Archeologia e Storia dell'Arte 5 (1935-36): 50-97.

12. On the two sculptures of Marsyas, see Francesco Caglioti, "Due 'restaura- tori' per le antichita dei primi Medici: Mino da Fiesole, Andrea del Verrocchio e il 'Marsia Rosso' degli Uffizi," pt. 1, Prospettiva 72 (Oct. 1993): 17-42, and pt. 2, 73-74 (Jan.-Apr. 1994): 74-96.

13. "Victor est quisquis patriam tuetur. / Frangit immanis Deus hostis iras. / En puer grandem domuit tiramnum. / Vincite, cives!" For variant spellings, see Caglioti (as in n. 2), 39 nn. 30, 31. Sperling (as in n. 2) discovered the inscription connected to the David recorded in a 15th-century manuscript and introduced it into the art historical literature.

14. Alessandro Parronchi, "Mercurio e non David," in Donatello e il potere (Bologna: Cappelli; Florence: Il Portolano, 1980), 101-15, first suggested the reidentification of the statue as Mercury, andJohn Pope-Hennessy, "Donatel- lo's Bronze David," in Scritti di storia dell'arte in onore di Federico Zeri (Milan: Electa, 1984), vol. 1, 122-27, supported it. Ames-Lewis, 1989, 238-39, and others have convincingly proposed that the identities of David and Mercury were instead conflated to create a multivalent image, different features of which could be seen from the ground and from the upper floor of the Medici Palace, thereby nuancing the sculpture's meaning to its audience. Patricia Ann Leach, "Images of Political Triumph: Donatello's Iconography of Heroes," Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1984, 53-154, most fully explored the underlying motives for merging David and Mercury in 15th-century Florence.

15. On the vexed question of dating, see, for example, Janson (as in n. 2), 33-38, who proposed a date of ca. 1430, seconded most recently by Sperling (as in n. 2). On the other hand, Francis Ames-Lewis, "Art History or Stilkritik? Donatello's Bronze David Reconsidered," Art History 2 (1979): 139-55, presented a serious case for a date as late as ca. 1460. For a convincing rebuttal of the literary and political arguments made by Sperling in favor of an early date, see Crum, 1996 (as in n. 1), 440-50. Although the weight of evidence now favors the late dating, the issue is not yet definitively resolved.

16. If, as some historians have argued, the purchase of bronze in Siena in 1457 is connected with the Judith and Holofernes commission, then the statue was under way by that date. For further speculation about the commissioner and date, see n. 5 above.

17. Michelangelo's commission for the colossal David is the fulfillment of a project originally awarded in 1463 to Agostino di Duccio to carve a statue of the Old Testament figure for one of the buttresses of the Duomo in Florence. The contract was rescinded by the Opera del Duomo in late 1466, by which time Agostino had completed little, if any, carving. Charles Seymour, Michelan- gelo's David: A Search for Identity (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), 36-38, suggested that Donatello was providing the design for Agosti- no's execution and that Donatello's death in 1466 led to the contract's cancellation. If Donatello's bronze David dates as late as ca. 1460, then these two commissions are roughly coincident, but we know nothing useful about the intended appearance of Agostino's sculpture and cannot characterize its interpretation of David.

18. For the documents, see Giovanni Poggi, II Duomo di Firenze: Documenti sulla decorazione della chiesa e del campanile tratti dall'Archivio dell'Opera, ed. Margaret Haines, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Florence: Medicea, 1988) vol. 1, docs. 425-27. On the history of the sculpture, see Janson, 3-7.

19. See Maria Monica Donato, "Hercules and David in the Early Decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio: Manuscript Evidence," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): 83-98. The inscription reads: ". .. statua Davidis marmorea cum funda in manu: cui adscriptum pro patria dimicantibus etiam adversus terribilissimos hostes deus prestat victoriam." This inscription is very similar to that in a late 16th-century guidebook by Laurentius Schrader, Monumentorum Italiae, quae hoc saeculo et a christianis posita sunt, libri quatuor (Helmstadt: Iacobus Lucius Transylvanus, 1592), fol. 78v, earlier discovered by

Janson, 4. The difference lies in the last words, which in Schrader's text read "dii prestant auxilium." The pagan implications of the phrase in Schrader occasioned doubts among scholars that the inscription could have dated from the 15th century. The inscription uncovered by Donato refers to one god and removes that problem.

20. SeeJanson, 3-7. Other scholars have disputedJanson's arguments about the successive stages of David's identity and the statue's recarving, arguing that it was always intended for the Palazzo della Signoria and not recut. For these points and bibliography, see Luciano Bellosi, "I problemi dell'attivita giova- nile," in Donatello e i suoi: Scultura fiorentina del primo Rinascimento, ed. Alan Phipps Darr and Giorgio Bonsanti (Detroit: Founders Society, Detroit Insti- tute of Arts; Florence: La Casa Usher, 1986), 47-54.

21. On examples of Judith with David, see Herzner, 1980 (as in n. 5), 164-69; and Mira Friedman, "The Metamorphoses of Judith," Jewish Art Journal 12-13 (1986-87): 235-39.

22. Modern theologians analyzing the text have pointed out its anachro- nisms and historical inconsistencies and argued that it was written as an allegory of the Jewish people to spur pride in their sense of identity. See The Book of Judith: Greek Text with an English Translation, Commentary, and Critical Notes, ed., trans., and annotated Morton S. Enslin and Solomon Zeitlin, Jewish Apocryphal Literature, vol. 7 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1972), 1.

23.Judith's role as a paragon of Christian virtues such as chastity, temper- ance, justice, fortitude, wisdom, and humility was established in the early Middle Ages by the Psychomachia of Prudentius, the very influential Christian epic written in 405. This spurred a large number of literary and visual

interpretations of the theme, and an equally extensive secondary literature in the modern period. For a brief synthesis of the Christian interpretations of

Judith, see Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 282-89; and Frank Capozzi, "The Evolution and Transformation of the Judith and Holofernes Theme in Italian Drama and Art before 1627," Ph.D. diss.,

DONATELLO'S DAVID AND JUDITH: METAPHORS OF MEDICI RULE 45

University of Wisconsin, 1975, 3-22. For the additional connotations of situating a sculpture of this theme in a garden setting, see Matthew G. Looper, "Political Messages in the Medici Palace Garden," Journal of Garden History 12, no. 4 (1992): 255-68. For an exploration of the popularity of the theme, see the recent study by Margarita Stocker, Judith: Sexual Warrior Women and Power in Western Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

24. The rim of roughly woven cloth, riding lower on her forehead than her veil, which has usually been discussed as an indication of Donatello's technique of casting from real cloth (see Bruno Bearzi, "Considerazioni di tecnica sul San Ludovico e la Giuditta di Donatello," Bollettino d'Arte 16 [1950]: 119-23), is relevant to the tale ofJudith. It could hint at the sackcloth in which she and the otherJews of Bethulia dressed as they beseeched God to deliver them from Holofernes' siege of their town. It further indicates the modesty with which the widowed Judith typically dressed, disguised by the finery and jewels with which she covered herself to seduce Holofernes.

25. The three Bacchanalian reliefs on the statue's base reinforce this meaning; see Edgar Wind, "Donatello's Judith: A Symbol of 'Sanctimonia,'" Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1 (1937): 62-63.

26. The medallion is described inJanson, 203. 27. Book ofJudith, 13: 6-10, 16: 19-20 (as in n. 22), 153, 175-76: "And going

to the bedpost which was at Holofernes's head, she took down from it his sword, and nearing the bed she seized hold of the hair of his head and said, 'Give me strength this day, Adonai God of Israel.' And with all her might she smote him twice in the neck and took his head from him. And she rolled his body from the couch and took the canopy from the poles.... Judith dedicated to God all Holofernes's possessions ... and the canopy which she had taken for herself from his bed, she presented to Adonai as a votive offering." Generally, this more dramatic rendition is not common until the 17th century, as in paintings by Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi; see Garrard (as in n. 23), 290-91, 307-36. A rare early example is Guariento's version for the chapel of the Carrara Palace in Padua, now in the Musei Civici, Padua (first cited by Herzner, 1980 [as in n. 5], 144-45).

28. An anonymous early 16th-century painting of the Execution of Savonarola in the Museo di S. Marco, Florence, records the group on the ringhiera, or rostrum, outside the Palazzo della Signoria after 1495, representing it as entirely gilded. Conservation reports indicate that it was not, but the painting's exaggeration makes clear the brilliant impression it must have had in the sun; seeJanson, 201.

29. "Regna cadunt luxu, surgunt virtutibus urbes: / Caesa vides humili colla superba manu."

30. "Salus Publica. Petrus Medices. Cos. fi. Libertati simul et fortitudini hanc mulieris statuam, quo cives invicto constantique animo ad rem publicam redderent, dedicavit."

31. Dante, Inferno, canto 4, line 123, and canto 34; Paradiso, canto 6. 32. In Boccaccio's unfinished commentary on Dante's Commedia, he de-

scribed how Caesar seized control of the government against Roman law and made himself perpetual dictator. See Boccaccio, Il Comento alla Divina Commedia, ed. Domenico Guerri, Scrittori d'Italia, vols. 84-86 (Bari: Giuseppe Laterza and Sons, 1918), vol. 1, 205, vol. 2, 49.

33. Harmodios and Aristogeiton succeeded in slaying only Hipparchos, the younger brother of the tyrant Hippias. The significance of the date of the killing was given additional resonance by Pliny in the Natural History, who claimed that it coincided with the day on which the kings were expelled from Rome. See the quotation of the passage in n. 38 below.

34. There are authoritative accounts of the group by Sture Brunnsaker, The Tyrant-Slayers of Kritios and Nesiotes (Lund: Hakan Ohlssons Boktryckeri, 1955); and Michael W. Taylor, The Tyrant Slayers: The Heroic Image in Fifth Century BC Athenian Art and Politics, Monographs in Classical Studies, 2d ed. (Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1981). For a succinct analysis with bibliography, see Sarah P. Morris, Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 297-308. For a recent account of the monument in relation to its site, see Ulf Kenzler, Studien zur Entwicklung und Struktur der griechischen Agora in archaischer und klassischer Zeit, Europaische Hochschulschriften, ser. 38, vol. 72 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999).

35. The only contemporary source is Cassius Dio, Roman History 47.20.4. For further information, see Elizabeth Rawson, "Cassius and Brutus: The Memory of the Liberators," in Past Perspectives: Studies in Greek and Roman Historical Writing, ed. I. S. Moxon, J. D. Smart, and A. J. Woodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 107; and Antony E. Raubitschek, "The Brutus Statue in Athens," in Atti del terzo Congresso Internazionale di Epigrafia Greca e Latina (Rome: "L'Erma" di Bretschneider, 1959), 15-21. No descrip- tion of the statues of Brutus and Cassius appears to have been preserved.

36. For the availability of these texts, see Ullman and Stadter, 216, nos. 791-92 (Pliny), 260, no. 1171 (Philostratus), 261, no. 1186 (Pausanias). See Brunnsaker (as in n. 34), 33-39, for a complete list of ancient authors who allude to the sculptures of Harmodios and Aristogeiton. The historical event was described by many authors; the most important sources, according to ibid., 1-3, are Aristotle, Thucydides, Plutarch, Cicero, and Seneca.

The most comprehensive text on the Tyrannicides is Pliny's Natural History, although even Pliny does not offer a complete physical description of the sculpture group. Cosimo owned a 13th-century manuscript of the Natural History procured for him by Niccolo Niccoli in Liibeck (listed in Ullman and Stadter as nos. 791-92). Cosimo's sons, Giovanni and Piero, each commis- sioned an illuminated version. All three manuscripts are now in the Biblioteca

Laurenziana, Florence. Cosimo's manuscript is Plut. LXXXII.1; those owned by his sons are Plut. LXXXII.3 and Plut. LXXXII.4.

37. The citation of the Tyrannicides stands out in Pliny's accounts of the development of bronze sculpture because it is so early in date. He otherwise traced the first bronze sculptures and the first paintings no earlier than the era of Phidias, decades after the creation of the Tyrannicides (Natural History 36.15).

38. According to the Natural History 34.17, from The Elder Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art, trans. KatherineJex-Blake and annot. Eugenie Sellers, 2d ed. (Chicago: Argonaut, 1968), 14-15: "The Athenians were, I believe, introduc- ing a new custom when they set up statues at the public expense in honor of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, who killed the tyrant. This occurred in the very year in which the kings were expelled from Rome. A refined ambition led to the universal adoption of the custom, and statues began to adorn the public places of every town; the memories of men were immortalized, and their honors were no longer merely graven on their tombstones, but handed down for posterity to read on the pedestals of statues. Later on the rooms and halls of private houses became so many public places, and clients began to honor patrons in this way"; and in the Natural History 34.70 (Jex-Blake and Sellers, 55-57): "Praxiteles also, although more successful and consequently better known as a worker of marble, created admirable works in bronze.... Other works of his are ... statues of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, the Slayers of the Tyrant. These were carried off by Xerxes, king of the Persians, and restored to Athens by Alexander the Great after his conquest of Persia."

39. Pliny particularly praised the ingenuity of Amphicrates' sculpture of Laena. He explained that the Athenians wanted to honor Laena's bravery but that they were unwilling to commemorate a harlot, so resorted to a play on her name and commissioned a statue of a lioness. They stipulated that Amphi- crates should carve the animal without a tongue so that Laena's heroic choice of silence would long be remembered (Natural History 34.72).

40. Lorenzo Ghiberti, I commentarii 1.6.8, ed. Lorenzo Bartoli (Florence: Giunti, 1998), 55-56, my translation: "I believe that the Athenians were the first to set up statues in public of the tyrannicides Harmodios and Aristo- geiton. It was done in the same Olympiad that the kings were expelled from Rome. From that point on very human ambitions led to the practice of installing statuary... as an ornament in all cities to commemorate throughout time the memory of men and of the honors they had gained, and the practice began of inscribing the bases [of the monuments] ...." Commentarii 1.6.33 (62), again following Pliny, attributes the Tyrannicides to Praxiteles: "Praxiteles was very happy and famous, and created the most beautiful works in bronze ... during the reign of Claudius he also made the Venus, which was in marble and of the most perfect art, and ... Harmodios and Aristogeiton the Tyrannicides, which was carried off by Xerxes and then returned to the Athenians by Alexander the Great, after he had conquered the [capital] city of Persia."

Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria 7.16, in the context of the invention of statues, wrote, "According to Aristotle, the first statues to be set up in the Athenian forum were those of Hermodorus [sic] and Aristogiton, who had originally delivered that city from tyranny. Arrian the historian recalls that Alexander returned these statues to Athens, after they had been removed to Susa by Xerxes"; Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 240. On 398 n. 184 discussing this passage, the authors point out that Alberti mistakenly claims Aristotle as his source instead of Pliny, Natural History 34.17.

41. The inscription was recorded by Hephaestion, Handbook of Meter; see John Maxwell Edmonds, Lyra Graeca; Being the Remains of All the Greek Lyric Poets from Eumelus to Timotheus excepting Pindar, 3 vols. (London: William Heine- mann; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1931), vol. 2, 377. On the impact of the tyrannicide in Greek history and literature, see Charles W. Fornara, "The Cult of Harmodios and Aristogeiton," Philologus 14 (1970): 155-80. On reflections of the event in folk tales, see M. Hirsch, "Die athenischen Tyrannenm6rder in Geschichtsschreibung und Volkslegende," Klio 20 (1926): 126-67.

42. See Victor Ehrenberg, "Das Harmodioslied," in Polis und Imperium: Beitrage zur alten Geschichte, ed. Karl Friedrich Stroheker and Alexander John Graham (Zurich: Artemis, 1965), 253-64; and Taylor (as in n. 34), 51-77. Such songs had so widespread an influence that, for example, in performances of Aristophanes' plays, characters who were meant to be identified with the tyrannicides sang the "Harmodios" and took the pose of his statue. See ibid., 195.

43. Donato (as in n. 19), 98, in her discussion of the marble David pointed out that this type of poetic verse was an innovation in inscriptions on 15th-century works of art.

44. See Morris (as in n. 34), 301, for a number of examples that seem politically motivated.

45. For the popularity of the depiction of the Tyrannicides, see Taylor (as in n. 34), 147-97; and Morris (as in n. 34), 300-308, 349-50. For a specific discussion of copies of the group, see W.-H. Schuchhardt and Charles Landwehr, "Statuenkopien der Tyrannenmorder-Gruppe," Jahrbuch des Deut- schen Archdologischen Instituts, Athen 101 (1986): 85-126. Taylor (as in n. 34), 78-158; and Morris (as in n. 34), 301-2, discussed how the poses of the

Tyrannicides were adapted in depictions of other mythological heroes like Herakles and Theseus and actual historical personages like Kallimachos. The association of Theseus with the tyrannicides is particularly significant as Theseus is the mythical founder of Athens and became a personification of its freedom. On Theseus, see Frank Brommer, Theseus: Die Taten des griechischen

46 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2001 VOLUME LXXXIII NUMBER 1

Helden in der antiken Kunst und Literatur (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchge- sellschaft, 1982).

46. See Hyman, 186-202. 47. Leon Battista Alberti, Ten Books on Architecture, Translated into Italian by

Cosimo Bartoli and into English by James Leoni, Venetian Architect, ed. Joseph Rykwert (London: A. Tiranti, 1955), 105. Alberti's remarks were cited in Hyman, 198.

48. Alberti (as in n. 47), 84, cited in Hyman, 198. 49. It also reflects a more general, frequently reiterated theme of the Natural

History: that the proper site for statues was in the public realm, where they served their rightful purpose of edifying citizens by reminding them of heroic deeds. Pliny's anecdote (Natural History 34.93) about the bronze sculpture of Herakles near the Rostra stands as a paradigm for his position that public display of power and splendor must be reserved for the state. Pliny described three inscriptions on the bronze. One said that it had been part of the booty taken by the general Lucius Lucullus, and another that it was dedicated, according to a decree of the Senate, by Lucullus's son while still a ward, and the third, that a public official had caused it to be restored to the public from private ownership. Pliny concluded the anecdote, "So many were the rivalries connected with this statue and so highly was it valued."

50. See Diane Bornstein, "Reflections of Political Theory and Political Fact in Fifteenth-Century Mirrors for the Prince," in Medieval Studies for Lillian Herlands Hornstein, ed. Jess B. BessingerJr. and Robert R. Raymo (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 77-85. On the presence of John of Salisbury's treatise in the library at S. Marco, see Ullman and Stadter, 195, no. 625. I would like to thank Professor Susan McKillop for bringing the treatise and its presence in the library to my attention. For McKillop's work on Medicean imagery, see "Dante and Lumen Christi: A Proposal for the Meaning of the Tomb of Cosimo de' Medici," in Ames-Lewis, 1992, 245-301, and her forthcoming book.

Cosimo himself owned a copy of "Epistula ad Traianum,"or "Institutio Traiani," the supposed letter to Trajan from Plutarch, whichJohn of Salisbury may have written himself but claimed as the ancient authority for his theories about the state as an organism. It is integrated into the prologue and the first chapter of the Policraticus, bk. 5, and provides the framework for that book and the following one, but it also circulated as an independent text. On the controversies about its authorship, see Tilman Struve, "The Importance of the Organism in the Political Theory of John of Salisbury," in The World ofJohn of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 305-6. For Cosimo's ownership of the "Institutio Traiani," see Ullman and Stadter, 144, no. 170, 310. For the history of the doctrine of Christ as the head of the body of the Church and its application to medieval theories of kingship, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, 6th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 193-232. For a cogent summary of the history of the classical tradition of equating the human body with the commonwealth and the medieval identification of the human body with the Church as well as the state, see Leonard Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 63-79. John of Salisbury was the first to elaborate this long-standing analogy into a lengthy and full-scale anatomy of the anthropomorphic state.

Although she did not explore the relationship, Susan L. Smith cited the Policraticus in connection with a Renaissance image ofJudith in her article "A Nude Judith from Padua and the Reception of Donatello's Bronze David," Comitatus 25 (1994): 72.

51. On the popularity of this sort of literature throughout the medieval period, see Bornstein (as in n. 50), 77-85.

52. Ephraim Emerton, Humanism and Tyranny: Studies in the Italian Trecento (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), 33-119, analyzed its impact on Italian political thought. W. Ullmann, "The Influence of John of Salisbury on Medieval Italian Jurists," in The Church and the Law in the Earlier Middle Ages: Selected Essays (London: Variorum Reprints, 1975), 383-92 (reprinted from English Historical Review 59 [1944]); and idem, "John of Salisbury's Policraticus in the Later Middle Ages," in Geschichtsschreibung und geistiges Leben im Mittelalter: Festschrift fur Heinz Lowe zum 65. Geburtstag ed. K. Hauck and H. Mordek (Cologne: Bohlau, 1978), 519-45, traced its impact on legal theory.

53. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 278-79. The writings of Thomas Aquinas were thoroughly represented in the Library of S. Marco. They constituted the largest single block of manuscripts donated to the library by Cosimo de' Medici. See Ullman and Stadter, 21, 310-13.

54. Ammon Linder, "The Knowledge of John of Salisbury in the Late Middle Ages," Studi Medievali, ser. 3, 18, no. 2 (1977): 900, discussed the Tabula, seu index rerum memorabilium quae sunt in PolicraticoJohannis Sariberiensis byJohn Calderini, which became enormously popular throughout Europe.

55. Linder (as in n. 54), 893-94. 56. Ullmann, 1975 (as in n. 52), 385. 57. Linder (as in n. 54), 899. See n. 50 above. 58. In one of the dialogues, the "De occupata tyrannide," Petrarch, who

annotated his own manuscript of Pliny's Natural History extensively, recounted with approval the tyrannicide accomplished by Harmodios and Aristogeiton. On Petrarch's manuscript of Pliny, now in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris, see Pierre de Nolhac, Petrarque et l'humanisme, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Honore Champion, 1965), vol. 1, 51, vol. 2, 70-77.

59. R. Rouse and M. A. Rouse, "John of Salisbury and the Doctrine of

Tyrannicide," Speculum 42 (1967): 693-709.

60. John of Salisbury, Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, 8.20, ed. and trans. Cary Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 207-9.

61. Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983), 368-69.

62. For further analysis and a translation of the De tyranno, see Emerton (as in n. 52), 49-116.

63. See Coville; and Bernard Guen6e, Un meurtre, une societe: L'assassinat du duc d'Orleans, 23 novembre 1407 (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).

64. The proceedings were published as Acta Concilii Parisiensis in the edition of Jean Gerson's Opera omnia, ed. Louis Ellies du Pin, 5 vols. (Antwerp: Sumptibus Societatis, 1706), vol. 5, 49-342. Petit'sJustificatio Ducis Burgundiae is included there, 15-42, as is the Acta in Concilio Constantiensi, 341-1012.

65. Coville, 497. 66. Ibid., 135-77. 67. Guenee (as in n. 63), 258-60. The proximate cause of this practical

experience and legal expertise was the assassination in 1412 of Duke Gianmaria of Milan, heir of Giangaleazzo Visconti, but equally relevant was the earlier Milanese history of acknowledged tyrants like Bernab6 Visconti, which had already raised the issues of what persons and means were authorized to end a tyrant's reign.

68. Cosimo de' Medici and other Florentines attended the Council of Constance motivated by ardent support of John XXIII, who had made the Medici papal bankers. John was deposed at the Council of Constance and offered refuge in Florence. He was subsequently accorded the rare honor of a tomb in the Baptistery of Florence, created by Donatello. On these issues, see Sarah Blake McHam, "Donatello's Tomb of Pope John XXIII," in Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, ed. Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt, and Rona Goffen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 146-73, 232-42. In addition, a record of the debates between Gerson and Petit in Paris and Constance is contained in the Opera omnia ofJohn Gerson, a copy of which was in the Library of S. Marco; see Ullman and Stadter, 175, nos. 435-37.

69. Bernhard Bess, "Die Lehre vom Tyrannenmord auf dem Konstanzer Konzil," ZeitschriftfiirKirchengeschichte 36 (1916): 1-61.

70. Ludwig Pastor, History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, ed. Frederick Ignatius Antrobus, 40 vols. (London: John Hodges, 1891), vol. 2, 216-37, provides a succinct account of Stefano Porcari's attempt to kill Pope Nicholas V and end papal rule in Rome. Porcari claimed that he wanted to reinstate a republic in the city of Rome modeled on that of ancient Rome.

71. Bortolo Belotti, II dramma di Gerolamo Olgiati (Milan: L. F. Cogliati del Dr. Guido Martinelli, 1929), provides a detailed account of the Milanese con- spiracy. The three conspirators, Giovanni Andrea Lampugnani, Gerolamo Olgiati, and Carlo Visconti, were inspired by the teachings of the court humanist Cola Montano. They were convinced of their legitimate right to rid Milan of Sforza, whom they considered a tyrant, and invoked the model of heroic Romans like Cassius and Brutus who had also been willing to die for the benefit of the state.

72. Rinuccini's treatise is translated in Renee Neu Watkins, Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century Florence (Columbia, S.C.:

University of South Carolina Press, 1978), 193-224. Rinuccini considered Lorenzo de' Medici a tyrant. Tellingly, he has Alietheus, the interlocutor called "the Truthful," speak the following words: "In all Italy ... there is no city [Florence] that has so energetically and enduringly championed the cause of liberty.... Thus did they [acopo and Francesco dei Pazzi] undertake a glorious deed, an action worthy of the highest praise. They tried to restore their own liberty and that of the country.... Men of sound judgment will always rank them with Dion of Syracuse, Aristogiton and Harmodius of Athens, Brutus and Cassius of Rome, and in our own day, Giovanni and Geronimo Andrea of Milan" (195-96).

On the Pazzi Conspiracy, see Riccardo Fubini, "La congiura dei Pazzi: Radici politico-sociali e ragione di un fallimento," Lorenzo de' Medici, New Perspectives: An International Conference, April 30-May 2, 1992, ed. B. Toscani (NewYork: Peter Lang, 1993), reprinted in Fubini, Italia quattrocentesca: Politica e diplomazia nell'ett di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1994), 87-106. I thank ProfessorsJohn Najemy andJudith Brown for bringing Fubini's essays to my attention and Dr. Betsy Rosasco for discussing the conspiracy with me.

73. Riccardo Fubini, Quattrocento fiorentino: Politica diplomazia cultura (Pisa: Pacini, 1996), 141-57, discusses the relationship of the legitimacy issues provoked by the assassination of the duke of Orleans to these events in 15th-century Florence. According to him (149), the notes of Donato Acciai- uoli, largely based on the lectures at the University of Florence given by the Greek scholar John Argyropoulos, reveal that interpretations of equitable authority, and consequently legitimate rule, were debated as the new edition of Aristotle was prepared. Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics continued to be of direct concern in Florence; see n. 87 below.

74. Policraticus 5.2 (The Statesman's Book, 65): "The place of the head in the

body of the commonwealth is filled by the prince who is subject only to God and to those who exercise his office and represent Him on earth, even as in the human body the head is quickened and governed by the soul...." John continued the biological metaphor by describing priests as the soul of the

body politic, judges and provincial administrators as the eyes, ears, and

tongue, knights as the body's hands, clerks of the treasury as its bowels, and the peasants and tradesmen of the state as its feet.

DONATELLO'S DAVID AND JUDITH: METAPHORS OF MEDICI RULE 47

75. For John's claims that he followed a political manual, the "Institutio Traiani," which he said was written by Plutarch for Emperor Trajan, see, for example, ibid., 5.2 (The Statesman's Book, 64). Historians generally think that John himself originated these theories and invented the existence of this manual. See, for example, Hans Liebeschitz, Medieval Humanism in the Life and Writings of John of Salisbury, Warburg Institute Studies, vol. 17 (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1950), 24-25. On the wide indepen- dent circulation of this excerpt of the Policraticus, see above at n. 57. On its presence in the Library of S. Marco, see n. 50 above.

76. Policraticus 3.15; The Statesman's Book, lxxiii: "To kill a tyrant is not merely lawful, but right and just. For whosoever takes up the sword deserves to perish by the sword. And he is understood to take up the sword who usurps it by his own temerity and who does not receive the power of using it from God. Therefore the law rightly takes arms against him who disarms the laws ..."

77. For the account ofJudith, see ibid., 8.20 (The Statesman's Book, 370-72). It is quoted in part below at n. 80.John made clear that not only kings but also their agents and other private individuals could be considered tyrants (ibid., 8.17; The Statesman's Book, 336): "It is not only kings who practice tyranny, but among private men there are a host of tyrants, since the power which they have, they turn to some forbidden object."

Both Jean Petit and Jean Gerson picked up the Policraticus's emphasis on Judith as an exemplar of tyrannicide and cited her in the debates at Paris and Constance. See Coville, 213, 436.

78. Policraticus 8.18, 8.20 (The Statesman's Book, 350-51, 373). Professor Roger Crum suggested to me that the expression on the face of the bronze David may relate to this characterization of David's role byJohn of Salisbury.

79. Ibid., 8.18 (The Statesman's Book, 356). Coville, 436, notes that Gerson in the debates at Paris and Constance exempted Judith from any sin for having flattered Holofernes.

80. Ibid., 8.20 (The Statesman's Book, 370-72).John is quoting from the Book ofJudith 9.12-15 and 10.2-4. He emphasizes his point that tyrannicides must work as God's agents by includingJudith's prayer for sufficient courage to do the deed and a detailed description ofJudith's beauty enhanced by God, both taken from the Book ofJudith.

81.John's endorsement of deceit and cunning was repeated by Italian political figures such as Cola di Rienzo, whose letter to the archbishop of Prague articulates this aspect of Judith (Epistolario di Cola di Rienzo, ed. Annibale Gabrielli [Rome: Forzani, 1890], 84, cited in Capozzi [as in n. 23], 22).

In later Renaissance thought and artistic representation, the undertones of Judith's sexuality and manipulative behavior became increasingly obvious and erotic, alluded to by partial or full nudity. By this time the subject of the wiles of women had become popular, and Judith was sometimes associated nega- tively with women like Delilah, Eve, and Aristotle's wife, Phyllis, who wielded their sexuality against men, betraying them and leading them to ruin. See, for example, Jan Biaostocki, "La gamba sinistra della Giuditta: II quadro di Giorgione nella storia della tema," in Giorgione e l'umanesimo veneziano, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini, 2 vols. (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1981), vol. 1, 193-227; H. Diane Russell, ed., with Bernadine Barnes, Eva/Ave: Women in Renaissance and Baroque Prints (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1990); and Raimond Van Marle, L'iconographie de l'art profane au Moyen-Age et a la Renaissance et la decoration des demeures, 2 vols. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1931-32), vol. 2, 479-81. There is a very rare alternate use of nudity to characterize Judith as an emblem of all'antica heroism; see the bronze statuette ofJudith by an anonymous late 15th-century artist from Padua, formerly in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin, discussed by Smith (as in n. 50), 59-80.

By the early 16th century reaction in Florence to Donatello's statue was mixed, perhaps reflecting some of these changes. When the question of where to place Michelangelo's David was debated in 1503, one committee member suggested that the Judith and Holofernes was considered an evil omen because it depicted a woman killing a man. Nevertheless, when the decision was made to set up the David on the ringhiera in its place, the Judith and Holofernes was reinstalled in the equally important ceremonial space of the republican government, the Loggia dei Lanzi. Perhaps its repositioning under the reliefs of the Virtues on the loggia facade was intended to emphasize the traditional associations of the theme as a triumph of virtue over vice, as suggested to me by Professor John Paoletti. In contrast, Yael Even, "The Loggia dei Lanzi: A Showcase of Female Subjugation," in TheExpandingDiscourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Icon Editions, 1992), 126-37, sees the sculpture's transfer to the loggia as a deliberate demotion.

82. John counseled against murder by poison, insisting the tyrannicide must be accomplished "without loss of religion and honor" (Policraticus 8.20; The Statesman's Book, 373). For the fuller context of his statement about murder by the sword, see n. 76 above. One of the arguments advanced at Paris and at Constance inJean Petit's defense of the legitimacy of the duke of Burgundy's tyrannicide of Louis of Orleans was its appropriate choice of weapon, a sword. Petit contrasted this to the earlier murder of the son of the duke of Burgundy by poisoned apple. See Coville, 104.

83. The topicality of the Policraticus may have inspired the changed iconography of David first seen in the marble David by Donatello, carved at the beginning of the 15th century when the controversy about the murder in France erupted. According to Janson, 6, there had been only one earlier representation of David standing triumphant over the decapitated Goliath,

that painted by Taddeo Gaddi in the Baroncelli Chapel, S. Croce, in the 1330s. It was part of a cycle of the lives of the Virgin and Christ, in which David figured as an ancestor, prophet, and type of Christ. Robert J. H. Janson-La Palme, "Taddeo Gaddi's Baroncelli Chapel: Studies in Design and Content," Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1976, 340-45, argued that the unprec- edented interpretation resulted from a specific familial association. He contended that the emphasis on David's heroic victory was intended to allude to the military accomplishments of Bartolo Manetti Baroncelli, an illustrious member of the patron's family.

84. See Nicolai Rubinstein, The Government of Florence under the Medici (1434 to 1494) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 88-135.

85. For the literary and graphic evidence concerning the appearance of the lost seated Marsyas statue, see Caglioti, 1994 (as in n. 12), 81-88.

86. Ibid., esp. 74-86. 87. Caglioti analyzed the relationship to Nesi's treatise L'etica nicomachea, pt.

1, De moribus dialogi quattuor, in ibid., 87-90. For copies of the treatise, see Indice generale degli incunaboli delle biblioteche d'Italia (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1972), vol. 5, 78, no. 8945. The copy owned by the Medici is in the Biblioteca Laurenziana Plut. LXXVII. 24. As Caglioti noted, Rosella Bonfanti, "Su un dialogo filosofico del tardo '400: Il 'De Moribus' del fiorentino Giovanni Nesi (1456-1522?)," Rinascimento, ser. 2, 11 (1971): 203-21, esp. 211, stressed the antityrannical emphasis of Nesi's commentary. The importance of Aristotle's treatise in Florentine political thought of the 15th century, precisely in regard to issues of legitimate rule and equitable government, was empha- sized by Fubini. See n. 73 above.

88. Wester and Simon (as in n. 11) attribute them to Donatello and date them ca. 1460; both arguments are followed by Ames-Lewis (as in n. 15), 147.

89. Martha A. A. Fader, "Sculpture in the Piazza della Signoria as Emblem of the Florentine Republic," Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1977, 193 n. 89.

90. Ames-Lewis, 1989, 248-49. 91. Ames-Lewis (as in n. 15), 144-45, 153, amplified the Neoplatonic

interpretation of the theme most recently expounded by Laurie Schneider, "Donatello's Bronze David," Art Bulletin 55 (1973): 215.

92. Leach (as in n. 14), 124-34. 93. Boccaccio, Genealogia deorum 5.25, cited in ibid., 133-34. 94. Wendy Stedman Sheard, "Antonio Lombardo's Reliefs for Alfonso

d'Este's Studio di Marmi: Their Significance and Impact on Titian," in Titian 500, ed. Joseph Manca, special issue of Studies in the History of Art 45 (1993): 327-28, 330-34, analyzed how Ercole d'Este was inspired by the decoration of the courtyard of the Medici Palace to link his own self-image as legitimate ruler of a peaceful and prosperous state to Bacchus.

95. Francesco Patrizi, "Ad Cosimum Medicem virum excellentissimum," in his Poemata (dedicated to Pius II), Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale II x 31, fol. 8v: "Ille pudicitiae libertatis quatit verendus. / Romanae, Brutus vindex ultorque tyranni." Patrizi and other partisans of Cosimo took the opportunity to praise Cosimo as the defender of a liberty akin to that of the Roman Republic against the Albizzi clan. Patrizi was also the author of De institutione reipublicae, a treatise on government of about 1460, which addressed the dangers of a state falling into tyranny if the people rejected outstanding leaders. On Patrizi, see James Hankins, "Cosimo de' Medici as a Patron of Humanistic Literature," in Ames-Lewis, 1992, 69-94, esp. 86, where the verse is cited; and Domenico Bassi, "L'epitome di Quintiliano di Francesco Patrizi senese," Rivista di filologia e d'istruzione classica 22 (1893): 385-470. More generally, on these humanist encomia to Cosimo, see Alison M. Brown, "The Humanist Portrait of Cosimo de' Medici, Pater Patriae," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24 (1961): 186-221.

96. On the enduring attachment to the concept of political freedom in Florence, even after its meaning had become symbolic under Medici rule in the 15th century, see Nicolai Rubinstein, "Florentina Libertas," Rinascimento 26 (1986): 3-27. After the expulsion of the Medici in November 1495, the Signoria decreed that the inscription on Cosimo's tomb reading "Pater Patriae" be destroyed and replaced by "Potius Tyrannus"; see idem (as in n. 9), 19-20. The original inscription was restored in 1512 and obliterated again in 1528.

97. The literature about the Medici family's strategy in the 15th century of manipulating traditional forms of Florentine art and architecture and Chris- tian imagery to its private purpose is too extensive to cite in full. See the pioneering essay by Ernst H. Gombrich, "The Early Medici as Patrons of Art," reprinted in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, vol. 1 (London: Praeger, 1964), 35-57. More recent studies by Francis Ames-Lewis, Roger Crum, and Isabelle Hyman are cited above. Among the many other publica- tions that could be cited, see Rab Hatfield, "The Compagnia de' Magi," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 108-61; Irving Lavin, "Donatello's Bronze Pulpits in San Lorenzo and the Early Christian Revival," in Past-Present: Essays on Historicism in Art from Donatello to Picasso (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1-28; and the essays in the following collections: Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher, eds., Cosimo "il Vecchio, "Piero de'Medici "ilGottoso, " 1416-1469: Kunst imDienste der Mediceer/ Art in the Service of the Medici (Berlin: Akademie, 1993); and Francis Ames-Lewis, ed., The Early Medici and Their Artists (London: Birkbeck College, University of London, 1995). Ames-Lewis has devoted a number of essays and articles to the patronage of Piero de' Medici. John Paoletti, who has published many articles on the family's patronage, and Susan McKillop are both preparing book- length examinations of the goals and political meanings underlying the family's patronage.