David (Michelangelo)
David is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture created in marble between 1501 and 1504 by the Italian artist Michelangelo. "David" is a marble statue of a standing male nude. The statue represents the Biblical hero David, a favoured subject in the art of Florence.
Saint Sebastian (El Greco, 1576–1579)
Much has been made of this unusual posture. As Andrew Casper says in his "Art and the Religious image in El Greco's Italy", the figure in "Saint Sebastian" is a quotation of a “figure taken from Michelangelo's body of work—though scholars do not agree on which one.” Certainly a number of scholars have made much of the seeming comparison between El Greco's Sebastian and various figures from Michelangelo's body of work. In his work on El Greco, Michael Scholz-Hansel states without prelude that the figure is “based on Michelangelo as well as on the renowned Greco-Roman statue of Laocoön and His Sons which the artist had evidently studied in the original.” Based on a visual comparison of the posture of the Palencia "Sebastian" with Michelangelo's statue of "The Genius of Victory", produced for the tomb of Julius II and now in the Palazzo Vecchio, Harold Wethey argues that Sebastian's unique posture in El Greco's painting was based on Michelangelo's sculpture, and is thus evidence of the esteem in which the painter held the giant of renaissance art, his own documented words notwithstanding. For Wethey, El Greco's supposed quotation of Michelangelo's sculpture indicates that El Greco's statement to Pacheco that Michelangelo did not know how to paint is better understood embedded within the context of the longstanding aesthetic debate over the relative virtues of 'disegno e colore' [design or drawing and color] and that, rather than a criticism of Michelangelo per ce, it merely establishes that El Greco felt firmly that color is more important than design when it comes to painting. Similarly, in a detailed analysis of El Greco's various recorded statements on Michelangelo, George A. Rodetis compares the posture of El Greco's "Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian" with that of the "Punishment of Haman" in Michelangelo's fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, suggesting that El Greco's emulation of the Florentine artist indicates that his derogatory statements about the painting skills of the latter can be better understood more as an indictment of the limits of fresco to portray the spiritual essence of a scene than a complaint about Michelangelo's mastery of his medium.
And yet, Rodetis does not base his entire analysis of El Greco's opinion of Michelangelo or his thoughts on the "paragone" [comparison of or rivalry between] relating to "disegno" and "colore" on certain compositional similarities of El Greco's work with that of Michalengelo. Indeed, he makes a point of clarifying that the seeming similarity of posture between Michelangelo's tortured "Haman" and El Greco's "Sebastian" might not necessarily indicate that the Cretan painter was paying homage to the Florentine and suggests as equally, if not more, probable the possibility that El Greco, familiar with Titian's treatment of Saint Sebastian in his "Averoldi Altarpiece", might have used the Venetian master's work as a model. It should be noted that the Sebastian depicted by Titian is, like El Greco's hanging from bonds which tie his elbows to a tree, and that, similar to El Greco's signature on the stone under the saint's left knee, Titian chose to sign his piece on the stone under his Sebastian's foot.