The Triumph of David

A fantastic procession winds its way through a Tuscan landscape dotted with hills and walled towns. Like its pair, The Story of David and Goliath, the whole scene is crammed with activity. Trumpeters play and extravagantly dressed nobles ride prancing horses, while their hounds, a cheetah and a bear trot along beside them (during the Renaissance cheetahs were kept for hunting).This pair of long paintings probably decorated a bed chamber in fifteenth-century Florence. Painted by Francesco Pesellino, their dimensions suggest that these panels were spalliere, pictures set into the panelling of a domestic interior, usually at shoulder height, above chests or seating. They were perhaps made for the Medici to commemorate a wedding. The family are known to have had paintings by Pesellino.Images of parades and processions were very well suited to this type of panel. Although it looks like fifteenth-century Italy, the story comes from the Old Testament. This is David’s return to Jerusalem after killing the Philistine giant Goliath, an enemy of Israel. He stands proudly, holding Goliath’s head by the hair, the body slung on the cart behind him. The bloody stump of the giant’s neck is visible between his feet. Saul, King of Israel, leads the procession towards the walled city of Jerusalem. He wears armour and a crowned helmet decorated with a dragon.Like his contemporary Paolo Uccello, Pesellino was intensely interested in showing animals, especially horses, in movement. The very emphatically male horses here are shown at a variety of angles – from the side, from the front, from behind – and in various poses. The way the muscles and heads are painted suggests he was working from drawings from life, like Pisanello, although occasionally the arrangement of legs is inaccurate and he may well also have been looking at equestrian sculptures too.At the far right outside the walls a betrothal is taking place: a young man in contemporary Florentine costume is being presented to a young woman and her companions. This could be an allusion to David and Michal, Saul’s daughter, who fell in love with David and married him or, more probably, the couple for whom the paintings were intended.