6.1 t
40 yrs
c. 1873
26
The commission
From ruined block to republic
1464
The Giant is begun
The Operai del Duomo, the works committee of Florence Cathedral, contract Agostino di Duccio to carve a colossal prophet from a single block of Carrara marble for the cathedral's roofline.
1466
Abandoned twice
Agostino roughs out the legs and torso, then stops. A decade later Antonio Rossellino takes the commission and quickly walks away too. The block - nicknamed 'il Gigante', the Giant - is left exposed in the cathedral yard.
1501
Michelangelo wins the block
After nearly forty years lying scarred and weathered, the flawed Giant is offered again. The Operai award it to a 26-year-old Michelangelo Buonarroti. He begins carving in September, working from a block others had already cut into.
1504
Unveiled in the Piazza
A committee including Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli debates where to put it. They choose the Piazza della Signoria, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio - the seat of the Republic. Moving the statue 800 metres takes four days.
1527
Damaged in a riot
During an anti-Medici uprising, a bench thrown from a window shatters David's left arm into three pieces. The fragments are gathered up by onlookers and the arm is later reassembled.
1873
Into the Accademia
After centuries of rain, frost, and pigeons in the open square, David is moved indoors to the Galleria dell'Accademia to protect the marble. A purpose-built tribune with a skylight is finished in 1882. A replica now stands in the original spot.
Interactive tour
Read the marble, one detail at a time
Every choice in the stone carries meaning - or solves a problem. Select a marker on the figure to see what Michelangelo was doing.
Detail 01 / 05
The drilled glare
Michelangelo cut a tiny heart-shaped pupil into each eye with a drill. The hollows catch shadow so the irises read as alert and faintly menacing, fixed on a threat to the left. From the floor below, the eyes seem to track Goliath rather than the viewer.
Design & symbolism
Why he stands the way he stands
Contrapposto
David's weight rests on his right leg while the left relaxes, throwing the hips and shoulders into opposing diagonals. This classical 'counterpoise', revived from antiquity, gives a static figure the coiled potential of a body about to move.
The moment before
Earlier sculptors showed David triumphant, foot on Goliath's head. Michelangelo chose the instant of decision - brow furrowed, sling slack, muscles gathering. The victory here is intellectual and moral, won before a stone is thrown.
Republican Florence
A young citizen facing a giant was the perfect emblem for a small republic surrounded by larger powers and the exiled Medici. Placed at the Palazzo Vecchio, David turned his glare toward Rome.
Renaissance humanism
The nude, idealised body asserts a humanist faith: that human reason and will, not size or force, decide the outcome. David is scripture rendered as anatomy, faith expressed through the dignity of the human form.
Technical details
Built to be seen from below
- 5.17 m
- ≈ 6,000 kg
- Carrara marble
- 1501 - 1504
The corrected proportions
David's head and his right hand are noticeably too big for the torso. This was not a slip. The Operai commissioned the figure for a buttress high on the cathedral, where a viewer on the ground would foreshorten the upper body almost to nothing.
Michelangelo enlarged the features that mattered at altitude - the watchful head, the sling hand - so the statue would read correctly from far below. When it ended up at eye level in the square, the exaggeration became part of its uncanny presence instead.
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
In view
The statue and its maker
Still standing
More than five hundred years on, a flawed block twice abandoned is the most recognised figure ever cut from stone.
The original lives under the skylight of the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. The Piazza della Signoria keeps its ghost.