Bronze St. George the Dragon Slayer Statue

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Shearman, John. "A Drawing for Raphael's 'St. George'." The Burlington Magazine 125 no. 958 (January 1983): 15-25, fig. 23, 24.

The Golden Legend narrative is the main source of the story of Saint George and the Dragon as received in Western Europe, Meanwhile, St. George was traveling near Silene when he encountered the princess on the road. She was distressed but resigned to her fate and told St. George what was happening. St. George pledged then and there to slay the dragon and save the princess from a gruesome and premature death. He sought out the dragon and without ceremony drew his lance and brought the dragon's reign of terror to an end. Recorded in Van der Doort, A Catalogue and Description of King Charles the First's Capital Collection of Pictures, Limnings, Statues, etc, from an Ashmolean manuscript (c. 1639), prepared for press by G. Vertue (printed by W. Bathoe), 1757: 4.St. George was the patron saint of the armorer’s guild and was known as a military figure, one who was well-known in the Byzantine East, but who was also known by the Crusaders who battled Muslim forces in the Holy Land. A popular tale involving St. George defeating the dragon came to be known through the collection of stories called the Golden Legend ( Legenda Aurea) in the late thirteenth century.

As governments were being overthrown all over continental Europe, the island of Gozo was experiencing a very different ‘revolution a revolution in artistic ideas. One of Donatello’s long-standing relationships was with the Medici family: from 1433 to 1443, he made decorations for San Lorenzo, the Medici Church. This commission included ten large reliefs in colored stucco and two sets of small bronze doors. In this period, he also created the bronze statue of David (ca. 1440), the first large scale free-standing nude statue of the Renaissance. Documents show that the statue was placed at the center of the Medici Palace courtyard in 1496.

He said the restoration process had been time-consuming, estimating that it had taken all those involved with the project about 1,000 hours to undo the damage and restore the work.

This piece was obviously meant to portray a youthful, courageous St. George, and few will dispute that Donatello's creation was anything but excellent. The Banner of St George by Edward Elgar is a ballad for chorus and orchestra, words by Shapcott Wensley (1879).However, the statue is just as remarkable for introducing an entirely new form of artistic work, located beneath the figure. The elegant Saint George and the Dragon relief Where Donatello's style was groundbreaking and based on reality, Ghiberti adhered to the International Gothic style, which dictated highly stylized and "perfect" versions of flesh-and-blood individuals.

Only the Latin version involves the saint striking the dragon with the spear, before killing it with the sword. [18] Jacobus (de Voragine) (1890), Graesse, Theodor (ed.), "Cap. LVIII. De sancto Georgio", Legenda aurea: vulgo Historia lombardica dicta, pp.260–264Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi (c. 1386 – 13 December 1466), better known as Donatello (Italian:[donaˈtɛllo]), was an Italian Renaissance sculptor from Florence. He studied classical sculpture and used this to develop a complete Renaissance style in sculpture, whose periods in Rome, Padua and Siena introduced to other parts of Italy a long and productive career. He worked with stone, bronze, wood, clay, stucco and wax, and had several assistants, with four perhaps being a typical number. Though his best-known works were mostly statues in the round, he developed a new, very shallow, type of bas-relief for small works, and a good deal of his output was larger architectural reliefs. Another interpretation claims that the statue stopped in Xewkija since this was the first church to be established as a parish outside the ancient walls of Gozo’s main town. Whatever the reason, the halt in Xewkija must have impressed the locals, since within a short time parish priest Nikola Vella commissioned the same Azzopardi to sculpt a statue of St John the Baptist for his parish; the statue of St John arrived in 1845. The earliest certain example of the "detailed" form may be a fresco from Pavnisi (dated c. 1160), although the examples from Adishi, Bochorma and Ikvi may be slightly earlier. [25]