Michelangelo's David

March 2004 -- Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6, 1475, in the Republic of Florence, in the small town of Caprese, where his father was administrator. For several generations, the family had been minor bankers in Florence, and his father was conscious of having come down in the world. For that reason, he was unhappy when his son announced his desire to be an artist, a job that the elder Buonarroti considered hardly better than manual labor. As a result, Michelangelo had to hold out until the fairly advanced age of thirteen before he was allowed to apprentice with the Florentine fresco painter Domenico Ghirlandaio.

After only one year, Michelangelo left Ghirlandaio to study in the sculpture school held in the Medici gardens. There, Michelangelo was deeply influenced by Neoplatonism. He also was secretly allowed to study the anatomy of corpses by Niccolo Bichiellini, prior of the church of Santo Spirito. By the age of sixteen or seventeen, Michelangelo produced two relief sculptures, Madonna of the Stairs and Battle of the Centaurs, which showed that he had achieved a personal style at a young age.

After the death of Lorenzo de' Medici in 1492, Michelangelo went to Bologna, where he was hired to finish a project—the last three marble statuettes needed to complete the tomb and shrine of St. Dominic—which he did during the years 1494-95. After a brief return to Florence, where Savonarola dominated, Michelangelo went to Rome and produced his first large-scale statue, Bacchus (1496-97), which was considered to rival the statuary of the classical world. The tipsy demi-god is a strange work—quite decadent, but in a pagan fashion, immoral rather than sinful. The work was soon purchased by Jacopo Galli, a connoisseur of ancient statues, who gave it pride of place in his collection.

The Bacchus led to a commission from a French cardinal who was handling his king's affairs at the Vatican. What the cardinal wanted was a pietà, which is the name for a general type of image depicting a mourning Mary supporting the dead Christ, an image of which Michelangelo's is now the most famous example. More common in France and northern Europe, the purpose of a pietà is to evoke in viewers reflection on, and repentance for, the human sin necessitating Christ's death. Commissioned in 1498, Michelangelo's Pietà was completed in 1500; he was 25.

Il Gigante

With the Pietà, Michelangelo's reputation as the greatest living sculptor was established, and in 1501 his native city of Florence commissioned him to create a huge statue of David, to serve as the symbol of Florence and to stand in the Piazza della Signoria in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine town hall. (It is now in the Galleria dell'Accademia of Florence.)

Michelangelo welcomed the assignment, in part because it would bring him back to Florence (Savonarola had been executed) but not least because of the challenge it involved. Most textbooks assert that the sculpture is 434 centimeters without its pedestal, that is, 14 feet and 3 inches. But a recent scan of the statue by researchers from Stanford University found that it is much taller: 517 centimeters, that is, nearly 17 feet. In either case, the statue certainly merited the name that Florentines soon attached to it: Il Gigante.

When Michelangelo finished the David in 1504, he was not yet 30. And he had 60 years yet to live.

The Man Who Belonged on Earth

To anyone who knows the story of David and Goliath, an obvious paradox arises from a statue of David that is seventeen feet tall. The mythical figure of David is supposed to be the giant-killer—yet, in view of his size, Florentines spontaneously called this David "The Giant." With that, the whole meaning of David's victory is altered. No longer does he represent a fable whose moral is "the bigger they come, the harder they fall." As Marcel Brion wrote: "Michelangelo's David is like Perseus and Siegfried, whose prowess was the result of their own strength and courage; they would have scorned to appeal for help, even from God" (Michelangelo, The Greystone Press, 1940). Another difference in Michelangelo's David is that he is shown before battle rather than after. Donatello's David shows a slender, boyish figure standing with a sword in his hand and one foot on the head of Goliath, smiling modestly at his victory. Michelangelo may have considered doing a similar figure, for he drew a sketch of a David similarly posed. But obviously he abandoned the idea, and in doing so he once again altered the emotional meaning of the statue.

Michelangelo's David possesses no supernatural powers—neither divine strength nor divine foresight. He does not know how the battle will end. He squints into the sun, seeing his enemy approach from afar. He is vulnerable, and he is apprehensive. But he knows what he must do, and he is determined. More than determined: His face exhibits that combination of strength and fierce intensity that Italians call "terribilita."

In The World of Art, Robert Payne wrote: "The David expressed a pagan reliance on strength, cunning, and intelligence. A muscular youth, with thick curling hair falling over the nape of his neck, with an expression of great power and refinement, he stands there like a god who has descended to earth in order to chastise the mighty and to tear kings from their thrones. His brows are knit, his eyes are watchful, the youthful body stands in absolute composure, conscious of its own strength, its own power to accomplish whatever the intelligence demands….He is more Apollo than David, and belongs more to Greece than to the Renaissance. Here Michelangelo stated once and for all, in a manner he would never surpass, the ideal inhabitant of the visionary earth."

Five hundred years later, our "most compelling, richly imaginative artist" gives us bewildering statues of tapioca and Vaseline. And five hundred years hence, we may marvel at how far we have fallen since his time.

This article was originally published in March 2004  issue of Navigator magazine, The Atlas Society precursor to The New Individualist.