Comparing Bernini's David And The Ecstasy Of Saint Teresa

Bernini’s sculptures transform people’s imagination into concrete marble. Two of his work, David and the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, were based on texts that illustrate human imagination. Nevertheless, Bernini was able to show the characters’ appearance, motion and feeling simultaneously in a visible way, thus his sculptures are even more impressive and express the fancy imagination even more explicitly than the text itself. The further analysis about David and the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa will prove this point.
David is a life-size marble statue which is 1.7 meters high. Bernini’s David shows the moment when David was about to kill Goliath. David is virtually nude. He hold his stone on the sling with his left hand, and his right hand hold the

other side of the sling and swings back, illustrating that he will throw the stone immediately. His entire upper body is extremely turned towards right side so that his shoulder and his chest almost forms a right angle. He also rotates his hips towards right to accompany his motion. His left leg is in behind. His left heel is left from the floor, and his left tiptoe is grip on the ground. His right leg is at front and goes down on his knees slightly. His right foot was gripped on the edge of the plinth, just like he would jump into the real world. His eyes, looking at his enemy, are fixed and determined. He frowns, which makes his brows outstanding. His lips are pushed towards each other into a tight line. His hair was fury. He is filled by his rage.
Behind his right foot there is an abandoned classical corselet. The corselet is as if made from metal. The piece of clothes David is wearing looks softer than the fabric which made the clothes under the corselet. The difference between flesh and metal is plain to see. Even David’s blood vessels on his arms are visible. These differences between textures even makes me wonder that their temperature must be different as well: The flesh was warm, the metal was cold.
The king of David was actually an important religious subject. Jesus was a descendant of the House of David. David lived in a small Israelite tribe that was threatened by Giant Goliath. When David heard this news he volunteered to kill Goliath. He picked five stones from the river band and used a sling as his weapon. One of his stone hit and killed Goliath. David became a hero and the king of Israel, who was considered as a righteous and justice king. His triumph towards Goliath was a battle which believed to be “the unarmed man defeats the one who is armed, the humble defeats the proud, ‘not by tallness, but by virtue’”in Bible.
David revealed exactly the moment when David was about to kill Goliath, but it also expressed Bernini’s own understanding of the context in Bible. The nudity of David was not mentioned in the text of Bible. According to Preimesberger, Bernini made David nude to emphasis the comparison between “armed and unarmed”. The classical corselet put under his foot clearly drew attention back to David’s nudity.
Another unique feature about Bernini’s David is that he is a human full of intense sensation, to be specific, rage.

This invention distinguish his David from any other David Statue before him. At Bernini’s ear, David was a popular subject in Italy. At that time Italy did not have a powerful central government, and cities were seeking for their independence. The story of David killed Goliath and won the independence of Israel was understand as a symbol of independent. Therefore the statue of David also had political meanings. The two most famous David were from Donatello and Michelangelo. Donatello made two David, one was marble and one was bronze, but the ideas behind them are same. Donatello’s David stood still. He had successfully achieve his goal and killed Goliath, whose head lying at his feet. Michelangelo’s David was nude and had perfect athletic muscles and proportion, and fairly smooth flesh. His body was so perfect that made him immortal and divine. He had not yet embarked on the actual combat but would departure instantly. He stood still confidently. Michelangelo’s David was actually much more vivid than Donatello’s. Nevertheless, when compared to Bernini’s David, even the former seems lack the sense of motion. Bernini made his David a mortal. Bernini expressed a man in the middle of his ferocious action in an ultra realistic

way.
The approach he used to study the statue in motion was very interesting. According to Baldinucci, who was Bernini’s contemporary biographer and historian, Bernini used to mimic his character’s behavioral habits for his sculpture creation. When made David, Bernini used himself as the model. Baldinucci also wrote that sometimes Cardinal Maffeo Barbernini would hold the mirror for Bernini when he was working, in this way he can look at himself. It seems that Bernini apparently could experience and express the emotion of rage easily himself. It is said that Bernini had used his own face as the model of the Damned Soul, which was a sculpture of a man in extreme fury. After compared the Damned Soul, Bernini’s self-portrait and the face of David, it is reasonable to believe Baldinucci’s words. Nevertheless, Bernini’s model was not only face, but also the practice of motion. It is likely that Bernini himself used the sling to unleash the stone in his studio, and found someone to sketch his action as the basic of David.
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa shows the m