Within Art there is many different Mediums, which you could choose from, as well as many different artists, but it wasn't hard to pick which artists and medium to pick for my research. The Statues of David caught my interest from the beginning of Art Appreciation, even though we didn't study them until later in the semester.
Within the course of two hundred years, there was four completely different statues of David created in Italy; all which are masterpieces. Donatello's came first, then Verrocchio's, followed by Michelangelo's, and finally that of Bernini. The four sculptors had completely different objectives to their own statues.
Donatello was the son of Niccolò di Betto Bardi, a Florentine wool carder. It is not known how he began his career, but it seems likely that he learned stone carving from one of the sculptors working for the cathedral of Florence about 1400. Some time between 1404 and 1407 he became a member of the workshop of Lorenzo Ghiberti, a sculptor in bronze who in 1402 had won the competition for the doors of the Florentine baptistery. Donatello's earliest work of which there is certain knowledge, a marble statue of David, shows an artistic debt to Ghiberti, who was then the leading Florentine exponent of International Gothic, a style of graceful, softly curved lines strongly influenced by northern European art. The David, originally intended for the cathedral, was moved in 1416 to the Palazzo Vecchio, the city hall, where it long stood as a civic-patriotic symbol, although from the 16th century on it was eclipsed by the gigantic David of Michelangelo, which served the same purpose. .
Andrea del Verrocchio (originally Andrea di Cione), Florentine sculptor and painter. Verrocchio is ranked second only to Donatello among the Italian sculptors of the early Renaissance. He was born in Florence and was trained in Florence as a goldsmith, with Giuliano Verrocchio, whose name he supposedly adopted as his own; as a sculptor, with Donatello; and as a painter, with Alesso Baldovinetti.
