 One of Donatello's earliest commissions was for the Armorer's Guild, a very powerful organization in Florence, and it's at the church of Orsan Michele. And he was commissioned to create a statue, a pinnacle relief, which is that triangular one at the top, and what's called a predello relief at the bottom of the whole ensemble, showing St. George, who was the patron saint of their guild. St. George was a warrior saint who lived during the Roman Empire, and of course, because of that, there is an emphasis on armor in this particular niche at Orsan Michele, because it's for the Armorer's Guild. This predello scene below the statue of St. George shows the most famous legend from the saint's life, where he's saving a princess from a dragon. So after he saved her, the entire town nearby that she was a part of actually converted to Christianity. He slayed the dragon with his sword while riding on a horse, which we see in the center of the relief, where George is battling the dragon. And the carving technique here is specific to Donatello. He invented it, and it's unusual. It's called Schiazzato, which literally means squashed in Italian, so it's a very low depth relief sculpture. If we compare the carving on Donatello's St. George relief to this one here by Nani Di Banco, which shows the four crown saints, we can see that Nani Di Banco's relief is much higher. So the figures are almost sculpted completely in the round, attached to a flat background, as opposed to the St. George, which has a bit more depth and dimension to it. The scene here also shows carvers and stone masons in their workshop, which is fun to look at from the perspective of materiality as well. One of the advantages to Donatello's Schiazzato technique is visible in this angled view of the St. George relief, where we see that George's head and the horse's head, the mane of the horse's hair, actually touch the top of the marble tablature above there, and they project out from the background, which is actually curved. It's concave in the upper area, and this would allow people to see the relief much more easily from below, because it's actually set much higher above eye level. So observers would be able to read it much more easily than they might Nani Di Banco's similar Pradella. Because the niche of St. George is now inside of a museum, and no longer on the exterior of Orsan Michele, we can see more of the actual construction of the relief. So inside of those blue boxes, you can see the seams where the marble is joined together, and the relief face, where the seam is carved, is actually wider at the part that touches the wall than in the front carved portion of the relief. So the side pieces actually sit partially in front of that marble block and touch more seamlessly together, so the seams actually aren't visible when the ensemble is completely together on the exterior of the church. Looking at this detail of the princess in front of the building, we see that her head, an upper body, projects out further off the relief plane than her feet as well, so it also accounts in the same way as St. George and the Dragon for the fact that the relief was viewed from below. And at the very right edge of the relief, we can see that there is a deeper carving inside of this actual building, so we see a recession into that space. And these sorts of differences and depths in carving, while very minimal, are something that Nani Di Banco couldn't do with the flat surface of his pradella. Zooming in to look at the view inside the building, we see that Donatello also carved tiles on the floor, and he actually did that with a pointed chisel, where he just barely scratched the surface of the marble. We can see that the pilaster on the left, that sort of column that makes up the doorway, stands a bit taller off the face of the relief, casting an actual shadow onto this interior space, something, of course, that would happen in real life when we're looking from a sunny exterior into a shadowed building as well. Zooming in behind the princess, we can see just how much detail Donatello carved into his Schia Ciotto relief. We see a Corinthian capital, that decorative capital behind the princess's head, and of course these beautiful trees. On them we can also see individual leaves. So Donatello spent a lot of time creating these to give a sense of atmospheric perspective, something that was very important in the Renaissance, and up until this point had only been done in painting. But because of this lower-level relief carving, the Schia Ciotto technique, he was able to accomplish it in marble as well.