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15. Il Gigante: Michelangelo’s David
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Chapter 15 Il GIGANTE Michelangelo’s David I t’s among the most famous statues in the world, so easily recognizable that advertisers use images of it to sell everything from cigarettes to soap, from motorcycles to men’s cologne. At the moment of its unveiling some five hundred years ago it created a sensation, and every year people still flock to Florence to stand looking up at it in awe. Michelangelo’s towering marble statue of David has the quality that defines greatness in art: no matter how often one sees the work, its impact never lessens. Although since 1873 the statue has been inside the Accademia delle Belle Arti, at the center of a domed rotunda specially designed to hold it, the David was never intended for such a sheltered and “arty” location. For almost four centuries Michelangelo’s masterpiece stood in the thick of Florentine politics, outdoors in the Piazza della signoria, in front of the city hall. There it was subject not only to weather but also to the changing fortunes of the Florentine state. Opponents of the government often expressed hostility by hurling stones at the statue, and in 1527 a bench thrown out a window of the city hall during a civic disturbance damaged the left arm and hand. A teenage boy rescued the pieces and kept them until they could be reattached. In the Piazza della signoria an inferior copy has replaced the original, luring ill-informed tourists and serving as a roost for the city’s pigeons. The origins of such a famous statue should be easy to trace but instead we’re confronted with as many myths as facts. Part of the problem lies in the stories spun by Giorgio Vasari, the man who, as a boy, saved the shattered pieces 236 aN arT LOVEr’S GuIdE TO FLOrENCE Michelangelo, David, Accademia delle Belle Arti. [18.208.172.3] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:51 GMT) Il Gigante 237 of David’s arm and who by the mid-sixteenth century had become the first biographer of Italian artists. His adoration of Michelangelo sometimes led him to embellish his anecdotes. Vasari claimed that Michelangelo returned to his native Florence in 1501 at the urging of friends, in order to work on a seventeen-foot-long block of marble that had been “spoiled” by the incompetence of a certain simone da Fiesole. Vasari also stated that this botched block had previously been offered to Leonardo da Vinci, and he implied that Leonardo wasn’t up to the challenge, but that Michelangelo sought out and received it as “a useless thing” that nobody else could have transformed into a credible human figure. scholars have reconstructed a different story. rather than coming back to Florence from rome at the urging of friends, what drew Michelangelo to Florence was his acceptance of a commission: a contract drawn up by the Operai (Board of Works) of the cathedral, which stipulated the subject, the artist’s payment in relationship to a time schedule, and a requirement that the work meet a stringent standard of quality. There’s no evidence that the Operai first offered the commission to Leonardo, and no indication that simone da Fiesole damaged it—as far as anyone can tell, no such person as simone ever existed. Vasari did have one thing right, though. An earlier artist had begun to carve the huge block and had left it incomplete. Who was he, and why was the project abandoned for nearly a generation before Michelangelo took it up again? Here, modern archival researchers studying the records of the Operai and the city government have uncovered a fascinating story unknown to Vasari. since the early years of the 1400s, cathedral authorities had envisioned a series of colossal statues of Old Testament heroes that would be placed high up on the buttresses of Florence cathedral. Although the project had never been fully carried out, it was never quite abandoned. Donatello, among the greatest sculptors of fifteenth-century Florence, had provided a huge terracotta statue of Joshua (destroyed in the 1600s), and in the 1460s he also received a commission for a second over-life-size figure, to be carved in marble. By that time Donatello, nearing eighty years old, was unable to tackle such a large commission without assistance, so a younger sculptor named Agostino di Duccio began the work under his direction. When Donatello died in 1466, official interest in the project ended, although the unfinished...