Lecture 22: The High Renaissance—Michelangelo
measuring 16 ½ feet tall without the base. Michelangelo was reworking a
block of marble that another sculptor had begun to carve. The ¿ gure was
originally intended to be placed on one of the buttresses of the Cathedral
of Florence, so it would have had to have been huge to be seen from the
ground. It is not clear whether a buttress was still the intended position when
Michelangelo took over the task of completing the statue, but by the time he
¿ nished, there was no thought of placing it there.Michelangelo’s achievement, not only in successfully working from an
inadequately thick block of stone that had already been abandoned, but in
creating a potent image of a biblical hero, was instantly acknowledged. The
cathedral authorities assembled a commission of prominent artists to decide
where the David should be placed. They selected a spot beside the main
entrance to the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of Florentine government. It
remained there until 1873, when it was moved to the Academy.Michelangelo’s David owes one thing to Donatello’s—its nudity. The artist’s
decision to create nude biblical ¿ gures was repeated many times in the Sistine
Chapel; thus, it is dif¿ cult for us to realize how little precedent it had. Apart
from Adam and Eve, nudity in a church setting was uncommon, despite the
widespread Renaissance interest in the representation of the naked body.
For Michelangelo, the body was the principal means of expression. When
nudity was completely inappropriate, he clothed his ¿ gures, but even then,
he produced such sculptures as a Risen Christ without a loincloth.As had the sculptors of antiquity, as well as Donatello and other Renaissance
predecessors, Michelangelo mastered the easy, asymmetrical balance of the
standing ¿ gure by making one leg weight-bearing while the other is relaxed.
The body has a straight, vertical side, closed, with muscular potential, and
David holds a stone in the hand by his side. The other side is open, his left
arm raised with the end of the slingshot held in his hand. He also looks left;
this is the vulnerable side, but the body is curved like a drawn bowstring.
The hands and head are oversized, stressing the fundamental qualities of a
guardian. Here, David is the civic protector of Florence, and his apparent age
and size—at odds with the Old Testament description—have identi¿ ed him
with Hercules in the public mind. A citizen wrote of Michelangelo’s David,