Statue of David by Michelangelo – Study This Michelangelo Statue
The statue of David by Michelangelo is among the most easily recognized sculptures in the world. The Guild of Wool Merchants, who were in charge of maintaining and embellishing the Florence Cathedral, commissioned the sculpture of David. Where is the statue of David and how tall is the statue of David? Let us discover more about the most famous of Michelangelo’s sculptures, David.
Michelangelo and the Making of David
Most earlier depictions of David show him triumphant after killing Goliath, sword in hand and the giant’s severed head at his feet. Michelangelo instead carved the youth in the moments before the fight, watching his opponent approach.
Michelangelo’s sculptures are in a league of their own, but what do you know of the man who created them?
Who Was Michelangelo?
| Nationality | Italian |
| Date of Birth | 6 March 1475 |
| Date of Death | 18 February 1564 |
| Place of Birth | Caprese Michelangelo, Italy |
Michelangelo Buonarroti, a sculptor, painter, architect, and writer, is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the Italian Renaissance. Before studying in the sculpture gardens of the illustrious Medici family, he worked as an artist’s assistant, and a distinguished career followed. Despite always identifying as Florentine, Michelangelo actually spent most of his life in Rome.
Michelangelo was more interested in observing the artists at the adjacent churches and then copying what he saw than in going to school.
Domenico Ghirlandaio may have been introduced to Michelangelo through his classmate from grammar school, Francesco Granacci, who is six years his senior. Early on, Michelangelo’s father noticed that his son had little interest in the family trade, so when he was 13, his father decided to let him become an apprentice to Ghirlandaio at the renowned Florentine artist’s studio. Michelangelo was introduced to the fresco method there.
Michelangelo learned classical sculpture in the palace gardens of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence, and head of the illustrious Medici family, from 1489 to 1492.
After barely a year at Ghirlandaio’s studio, on the advice of his tutor, an extraordinary chance became available to him. This was a fruitful time for Michelangelo because of his years spent living with the family, which gave him access to Florence’s social elite and gave him the chance to study under the renowned sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni and interact with eminent poets, academics, and knowledgeable humanists. He also received special authorization from the Catholic Church to study corpses to gain knowledge of anatomy, even though being around dead people was bad for his health.
These intertwined inspirations established the foundation for Michelangelo’s particular style, which combines a muscular truth and accuracy with nearly poetic beauty. Michelangelo had his share of critics despite being respected and patronized by the affluent and powerful men of Italy due to his smart mind and plenty of abilities. He had a combative nature and a short fuse, which resulted in tense interactions, frequently with his bosses.
This not only caused Michelangelo to get into problems but also led to general unhappiness on the part of the painter, who always sought perfection but was unwilling to make concessions.
Understanding the Michelangelo Statue of David
| Date Completed | 1504 |
| Medium | Marble |
| Dimensions (cm) | 517 |
| Weight | Approx. 5,660 kg (about 6 tons) |
| Current Location | Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence |
The statue of David by Michelangelo was initially intended to be one of many prophet sculptures placed along the roof of Florence Cathedral’s east end, but it was instead erected in a square outside the Palazzo Vecchio. What is the statue of David holding and which Las Vegas hotel features a replica of the statue of David? In this part, we shall take an in-depth look at the sculpture of David.
Quick Timeline
| 1410 | Donatello carves a terracotta Joshua, the first in a planned series of prophet statues for the cathedral. |
| 1464 | Agostino di Duccio begins a marble David for the same series, using a new block from Carrara. |
| 1466 | Work on the block stops, reportedly not long after Donatello’s death, and it sits unused in the cathedral yard. |
| 1501 | Michelangelo, aged 26, is awarded the contract on August 16 and begins carving on September 13. |
| 1504 | The finished statue is installed beside the Palazzo Vecchio in June. |
| 1527 | Its left arm is broken into three pieces during an anti-Medici uprising. |
| 1873 | The statue is moved indoors to the Galleria dell’Accademia for protection. |
| 1991 | A man attacks the left foot with a concealed hammer, chipping several toes. |
| 2003-2004 | The statue receives its first full cleaning since 1843. |
| 2010-present | Florence and the Italian state remain in an unresolved dispute over ownership. |
Commission
The statue’s history began before Michelangelo began working on it between 1501 and 1504. Members of the powerful woolen fabric guild had intended to commission a series of 12 enormous Old Testament statues for the cathedral’s buttresses before Michelangelo’s participation. Donatello created the first sculpture, a clay statue of Joshua, in 1410. Agostino di Duccio, a Florentine artist, was contracted to create a statue of Hercules in clay in 1463; it is possible that Donatello oversaw its creation.
In order to further their project, the Operai hired Agostino to make a sculpture of David in 1464.
A slab of marble was delivered, and it came from a mine in Carrara, a town in northern Tuscany’s Apuan Alps. Agostino only managed to rough out some draperies, gouge a hole between the legs, and begin shaping the feet, legs, and torso before work stopped, reportedly not long after Donatello’s death in 1466. Roughly a decade later, Antonio Rossellino was engaged to continue where Agostino had left off.
The slab of marble was abandoned for 26 years while left outside in the yard of the cathedral workshops when Rossellino’s contract was canceled shortly after.
The Opera officials were quite concerned about this since transporting such a massive piece of marble to Florence would be difficult and labor-intensive in addition to being expensive. The sculpture was described as “a certain figure of marble called David, badly blocked out and supine” in inventories of the cathedral workshop from 1500.
The Operai were eager to locate a craftsman who could transform this sizable block of marble into a full piece of artwork, according to records that were discovered a year later. They requested that the stone block, which they referred to as “the Giant,” be “raised on its feet” so that a craftsman skilled in this field might study it and provide feedback.
Despite consultation with Leonardo da Vinci and others, it was Michelangelo, who was 26 years old, who persuaded the Operai that he should be given the commission.
Michelangelo received the official contract on August 16, 1501, authorizing him to start on this difficult new assignment. On September 13, one month after receiving the contract, he started sculpting the figure early in the morning. He would spend more than two years constructing the enormous statue.
Placement of the Michelangelo Statue
Authorities in Florence had to admit that raising the almost six-ton sculpture to the roof of the cathedral would be difficult on January 25, 1504, as the sculpture was getting close to completion. To choose a suitable location for David, they gathered a committee of 30 Florentine residents, among them Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci.
Although there were nine potential places for the statue, the bulk of the members seemed to favor just two.
One team, headed by Giuliano da Sangallo and supported by Leonardo da Vinci and Piero di Cosimo, argued that the flaws in the marble meant the statue should stand under the roof of the Loggia dei Lanzi, while the other team believed it ought to be positioned at the entrance to the Palazzo della Signoria, the city’s town hall. Botticelli also agreed that the statue should be placed on or close to the church.
The sculpture of “David” was erected adjacent to the Palazzo Vecchio’s entryway in June 1504, taking the place of Donatello’s bronze statue of Judith and Holofernes, which expressed a similar subject of valiant struggle.
Moving the sculpture the half-mile from Michelangelo’s studio to the Piazza Della Signoria took four days. Later that season, the figure received a golden loin-garland in addition to the slings and tree-stump support being gold-plated.
Later History
Small fractures were discovered on David‘s left leg in the middle of the 19th century, which may have been caused by an uneven sinking of the earth beneath the enormous statue. To prevent damage, the statue of David by Michelangelo was taken from the square in 1873 and put on display at Florence’s Accademia Gallery, where it drew a lot of people. In 1910, a copy was erected in Piazza Della Signoria.
An artist named Piero Cannata, who the authorities characterized as insane, assaulted the monument in 1991 with a hammer he had tucked away under his jacket.
He later claimed that a Venetian artist’s model from the 16th century had instructed him to execute so. As Cannata attempted to injure the left foot’s toes, he was detained. A fiberglass copy of David was temporarily mounted atop the Florence Cathedral’s roof on November 12, 2010, but just for that one day. Photos of the installation show the statue how the Operai intended it to be seen when they commissioned the piece.
The ownership of “David” has been disputed since 2010, when the city of Florence asserted a claim to the sculpture that the Italian Ministry of Culture has rejected; the dispute remains unresolved.
Separately, in recent years the Galleria dell’Accademia has pursued and won a series of lawsuits against companies that used photographs of David commercially without permission, arguing under Italy’s cultural heritage code that reproducing a state-owned artwork for profit requires payment and consent.
Interpretations of the Michelangelo Statue
David‘s posture differs from prior Renaissance paintings of him. No earlier Florentine artist had completely left out the giant; however, the bronze statues by Verrocchio and Donatello depicted the hero triumphantly standing over the skull of Goliath, and the artist Andrea del Castagno depicted the boy in mid-swing while Goliath’s head settled between his feet.
Most academics agree that David is shown before his fight with Goliath.
When David decides to take on Goliath, but before the fight actually starts, he appears nervous and prepared for war rather than triumphant over a much greater opponent. His veins protrude from his dropped right hand, his forehead is furrowed, and his neck is tensed. His right hand rests near the sling’s handle, with the sling itself slung over his left shoulder. His nakedness echoes a detail from the biblical account: before facing Goliath, Saul dresses David in his own armor, a bronze helmet and coat of mail, but David finds it unfamiliar and unwieldy, removes it, and goes to meet Goliath with only his sling (1 Samuel 17:38-39).
A digital scan of the statue made in the late 1990s by Stanford University’s Digital Michelangelo Project recorded a small irregularity in David’s face: one eye looks straight ahead while the other is angled slightly outward. Saad Shaikh and James Leonard-Amodeo, working from that scan, argued in 2005 that the divergence is deliberate rather than a flaw: as a viewer walks around the statue, only one eye is clearly visible at a time, so from either side the gaze reads as steadily fixed on its target. Separately, the oversized head and hands may be explained by the statue’s original destination: placed high on the cathedral roofline and seen from far below, those parts would have been accentuated to remain legible.
His body’s twist effectively gives the audience the sense that he is going to move, which is reinforced by contrapposto. The statue is a Renaissance version of an archetypal ancient Greek figure of the heroic male standing naked. Contrapposto was regarded in the High Renaissance as a hallmark of classical sculpture. The pose is most closely associated with Polykleitos’s fifth-century BCE Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer), though earlier Greek sculptures, such as the Kritios Boy, already show the weight shifted onto one leg.
“David” is a good example of this since the figure is standing with one leg supporting the entire weight and the other leg extended.
In this traditional position, the hips and shoulders rest at opposing angles, giving the entire body a slight S-curve; the turn of the head and the opposing placement of the arms further draw attention to the twist. Michelangelo’s David is widely read as a symbol of youthful strength held in reserve, and his contemporaries were reportedly astounded by the statue’s sheer scale alone. Unlike the balanced proportions of Michelangelo’s paintings, David‘s head and hands are disproportionately large.
The modest size of the genitalia follows a classical Greek convention in which restraint, rather than youth, was the point: an exaggerated penis was reserved for lustful or uncivilized figures such as satyrs, while a small one signaled self-control. The statue’s unusual thinness from front to back, meanwhile, likely stems from the marble block itself: earlier sculptors had already carved into it before Michelangelo took over, leaving him less depth to work with than a fresh block would have offered.
Before Michelangelo started working on the “David”, it’s probable that the monument was intended to have a political purpose.
David had long been regarded as a political figure in Florence, where representations of the Biblical hero had political connotations. When the Medici family was expelled from Florence in 1494, the Signoria claimed ownership of Donatello’s bronze David, which was created for them sometime around 1440. The statue was then placed in the yard of the Palazzo Della Signoria, where it served as a symbol of the city’s Republican government.
By placing Michelangelo’s David in the same spot once held by Donatello’s bronze Judith and Holofernes, Florentine authorities gave the Palazzo Vecchio a new political emblem as well as an artistic one. Due to these political implications, the statue was twice attacked in its early years. It was stoned by protesters the year it made its premiere, and during an anti-Medici uprising in 1527, its left arm was shattered into three parts.
Commentators have drawn attention to the foreskin on David’s penis, which contradicts the Jewish custom of circumcision yet is in line with Renaissance painting traditions.
Conservation of the Sculpture of David
David was bricked in during World War II to shield it from aerial bombing. Its left foot had already been worn by decades of weathering when, in 1991, a man struck it with a hammer he had hidden under his jacket, chipping several toes.
Scientists were able to identify the marble used as being from the Fantiscritti quarry in Miseglia, the heart of three tiny valleys in Carrara, thanks to samples recovered from that occurrence.
The marble in issue degrades more quickly than other marbles because it has several small holes. Because of the deterioration of the marble, the monument had its first thorough cleaning since 1843 between 2003 and 2004. To prevent additional degradation, several specialists opposed using water to clean the monument. Restorers Cinzia Parnigoni and Monica Eichmann worked on the monument under the supervision of Franca Falletti, director of the Galleria dell’Accademia.
To protect the marble, it was suggested in 2008 that the statue in Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia be shielded from the vibration of visitors’ feet.
Replicas of the Statue of David by Michelangelo
Since 1873, David has been on view in Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia. A bronze replica may be seen from the Piazzale Michelangelo overlooking Florence in addition to the full-sized replica that stands in front of the Palazzo Vecchio where the original formerly stood.
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s plaster cast of David features a removable plaster fig leaf that is on exhibit close by. The fig leaf, according to legend, was made as a reaction to Queen Victoria’s horror at first seeing the statue’s nudity and was draped on the statue before royal visits using two carefully positioned hooks.
More than five centuries after Michelangelo finished carving it, David remains one of the most recognized sculptures in the world, and the Galleria dell’Accademia continues to assert legal control over its image, while the question of who owns it remains unresolved between the city of Florence and the Italian state.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where Is the Statue of David?
The council committee that reviewed the finished statue chose to place David outside the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence’s town hall, rather than on the roofline of the cathedral for which it was originally planned. Moving the nearly six-ton sculpture there from Michelangelo’s workshop took four days. Its exposed position in the piazza left it vulnerable to weathering and vandalism, and in 1873 the city moved it indoors to the Galleria dell’Accademia, where it remains today; a full-size replica has stood in its original outdoor spot since 1910.
What Is the Statue of David Holding?
David holds a sling, its strap draped over his left shoulder and its pouch grasped in his left hand. According to the Bible, he also carried a shepherd’s staff and several smooth stones on his way to face Goliath, but Michelangelo’s statue shows only the sling.
Which Las Vegas Hotel Features a Replica of the Statue of David?
You can locate an identical duplicate of Michelangelo’s iconic David sculpture at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The replica of David, which is over nine tons in weight and measures 18 feet tall, is made of the same Italian marble as the genuine one. The David sculpture is located at Caesars Palace’s Appian Way Shops.
How Tall Is the Statue of David?
Michelangelo’s David stands 5.17 meters (about 17 feet) tall and weighs roughly 5,660 kilograms (a little over six tons), not counting its marble pedestal. That makes it roughly the height of a two-story building, far larger than a real human figure.
Why Are David’s Head and Hands So Large?
David’s head and hands are thought to have been enlarged because the statue was originally planned for the cathedral roofline, to be seen from far below and at a steep angle, where finer proportions would have been lost. When David was placed at ground level in the piazza instead, that exaggeration became one of its most noticeable features, especially in the oversized right hand gripping the sling.
Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.
Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.
Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team.
Cite this Article
Isabella, Meyer, “Statue of David by Michelangelo – Study This Michelangelo Statue.” Art in Context. July 19, 2022. URL: https://artincontext.org/statue-of-david-by-michelangelo/
Meyer, I. (2022, 19 July). Statue of David by Michelangelo – Study This Michelangelo Statue. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/statue-of-david-by-michelangelo/
Meyer, Isabella. “Statue of David by Michelangelo – Study This Michelangelo Statue.” Art in Context, July 19, 2022. https://artincontext.org/statue-of-david-by-michelangelo/.
