Resumen de Parading David
This essay centres on a parade shield with an image of David defeating Goliath, made around 1450 by the Florentine painter Andrea del Castagno. The shield was created as the art-object was emerging as an aesthetic and cultural category, one that did not depend on the use-value of the objects designated by it. The fascination of Castagno’s shield lies in its dramatic staging of this problem, the collision of aesthetic challenge and actual use. The two are successfully hinged together by a cultural and conceptual problem common to both: how to stage the bodies of men, particularly young men, for civic, erotic, and artistic ends. Three contests of male youth coalesced here: David defeating Goliath; the displays of young Florentines in which such parade shields were used; and the struggle of Castagno and his generation to create a modern painting to rival the mythic fi gures of ancient art.
