David

Walk all the way round. From the front the pose is classical, weight on the right leg, left leg relaxed, the contrapposto of ancient statues. From the side you notice how shallow the block was, since Michelangelo carved the figure from a tall, narrow piece of marble that two earlier sculptors had abandoned as ruined. The head and hands are deliberately oversized, partly because the statue was meant to be seen from below on the cathedral roofline, partly to express the strength of mind and hand that Florence prized. The surface is astonishing: the tension in the neck muscles, the softness of the belly, the curls of the hair, all in stone.

The statue was finished in fifteen hundred and four, when Michelangelo was twenty nine. A committee that included Leonardo and Botticelli decided to place it not on the cathedral but in front of the Palazzo Vecchio as a symbol of the republic, the small city that defied its Goliaths. It stood there in the open for over three and a half centuries, damaged by weather and once by a bench thrown from a window during a riot, until it was moved here in eighteen seventy three. The Tribune was built around it, and a copy now stands in the square.

Did You Know? The marble block had been abandoned for about forty years and was known in Florence simply as the Giant before Michelangelo took it on.