GALLERY 4: Andrea del Castagno, The Youthful David, painted c. 1450
Not simply a work of art, this painted leather shield reflects the uniquely nationalistic consciousness of the Florentine city-state. As a public image carried in parades and ceremonies, its function was to symbolize the Florentine struggle for freedom and, as a gruesome depiction of victory against oppression, to warn all potential enemies of Florence. On the shield, both main episodes of the Old Testament story appear concurrently: David takes aim with his sling, while the giant’s head lies already severed at his feet. The effective, although awkward, foreshortening of the upraised arm and the sharply delineated veins and muscles attest to Castagno’s Renaissance interest in the realistic rendition of perspective and anatomy.
GALLERY 6: Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra de’ Benci, painted c. 1480
With precise draftsmanship and an infinitely subtle manipulation of light and shadow, Leonardo captures the character of a young Florentine noblewoman of the fifteenth century. In her eyes he has drawn a look of intelligence; in her bearing and the set of her mouth, there is a sense of determination and conviction. Punning on the name of his sitter, the artist has framed her head with a juniper bush—ginepro in Italian—and decorated the back of the panel with a juniper sprig. Commissioned just after he completed an apprenticeship with Verrocchio, this early work is the only painting in the Western hemisphere accepted by scholars as indisputably by Leonardo, one of the true geniuses of the Renaissance.
GALLERY 8: Raphael, The Alba Madonna, painted c. 1510
The solidity and serenity of the figures derive from the forms and poses seen in ancient Roman sculpture and from the art of Raphael’s contemporaries, Leonardo and Michelangelo. The equilibrium and stability of the grouping provides not only a freshness and majesty suitable for the religious moment but also a source of contrast to the subtle but painful implications of the reed cross held by the two children. Named for the Spanish Dukes of Alba who once owned it, the Alba Madonna is one of five paintings by Raphael in the National Gallery of Art.