In the late summer of 1501, a 26-year-old sculptor began work on a piece of marble that all of Florence knew as "the Giant" — and knew as a failure. The colossal block, quarried at Carrara nearly four decades earlier for a scheme to crown the cathedral with statues of prophets, had defeated two artists already: Agostino di Duccio roughed it out and abandoned it in the 1460s, and Antonio Rossellino gave up on it in 1476, put off by the stone's flaws. Since then it had lain in the cathedral workshop yard, part-hacked and rained on, a civic embarrassment nobody dared cut further. Michelangelo Buonarroti looked at the mangled Giant, negotiated a contract in August 1501, built a screen around it so no one could watch — and in roughly two and a half years released from it the most famous statue on Earth.
What emerged in 1504 was startling in more than scale. At about 5.17 metres — some 17 feet — and roughly six tonnes, David was the largest free-standing marble carved since antiquity. And Michelangelo had broken decisively with tradition. Donatello's and Verrocchio's celebrated bronze Davids showed a triumphant boy after the battle, sword in hand, Goliath's head at his feet. Michelangelo chose the moment before: no giant, no sword, just a tense young man with his sling over his left shoulder, a stone cupped in his oversized right hand, brow furrowed, weight settled into the contrapposto stance he had studied in classical fragments. The head and hands are deliberately overscaled — partly, scholars suggest, because the figure was designed to be read from far below, on the cathedral's roofline that it never reached.
The committee and the move
By the time the statue was finished, it was obviously too good — and perhaps too heavy — to hoist onto a buttress. In January 1504 the city convened a committee of about thirty artists and citizens to decide where the Giant should stand; the minutes survive, recording the opinions of, among others, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo and Giuliano da Sangallo. Leonardo favoured the sheltered Loggia dei Lanzi; the winning view placed David at the entrance of the Palazzo Vecchio, seat of government, displacing Donatello's Judith and Holofernes. The republic, which had expelled the Medici in 1494, read the statue plainly: little Florence, watchful and unafraid among Goliath states. Moving it took four days and some forty men, the statue inching through the streets in a wooden cage suspended on greased beams — and en route it was stoned at night by vandals, generally assumed to be Medici sympathisers who understood the symbolism perfectly.
Broken arm, hammer blows and a long retirement indoors
The statue's afterlife has been eventful. In 1527, during an anti-Medici riot, a bench hurled from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio snapped off David's left arm in three pieces; the fragments were rescued and hidden by two teenagers — one of them Giorgio Vasari, the future biographer of the Renaissance — and reattached years later. Weather gnawed at the marble for over three centuries until, in 1873, the original was hauled indoors to the Galleria dell'Accademia, where a purpose-built domed tribune now frames it; the replica familiar to tourists took its place outside the Palazzo Vecchio in 1910. Even indoors it was not safe: in 1991 a disturbed man named Piero Cannata attacked it with a hammer he had hidden under his jacket, chipping a toe on the left foot before being wrestled away. Modern diagnostics have found hairline micro-fractures in the ankles — the legacy of centuries spent leaning off-plumb — and traces suggest the sling and tree stump were once gilded.
Vasari's verdict has never really been improved upon: whoever has seen Michelangelo's David, he wrote, has no need to see anything else by any other sculptor, living or dead. The deeper marvel is the one Florence never tires of telling — that the perfect statue came out of the imperfect stone, the block with the flaws, the one everyone else had abandoned. Michelangelo himself is credited, in a much-embroidered later tradition, with saying that the figure was already in the marble and merely needed setting free. Whether or not he ever put it that way, in this one case the myth and the block agree.
Quiz nuggets
- David was carved 1501–04 from a Carrara block abandoned by Agostino di Duccio (1460s) and Antonio Rossellino (1476), nicknamed "the Giant".
- Michelangelo was 26 when he won the commission; the finished figure stands about 5.17m tall and weighs around six tonnes.
- A 1504 placement committee including Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli sited it outside the Palazzo Vecchio, replacing Donatello's Judith.
- Unlike Donatello's and Verrocchio's Davids, it shows the moment before the fight — sling on shoulder, stone in the oversized right hand.
- The left arm was smashed by a bench in a 1527 riot; the statue moved indoors to the Accademia in 1873, and a hammer attack chipped a toe in 1991.