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The Giant
By peace | September 11, 2010
Michelangelo working on David, The Giant
During the years he was in Rome, Michelangelo’s friends wrote to him with news from Florence. Things were changing for the better, they told him. Savonarola was gone, having made the fatal mistake of charging the pope with corruption. The pope had struck back, accusing Savonarola of heresy, for which charge the monk was executed in the public square, on the very spot where he had once held his ‘bonfires of the vanities’. The people of Florence, no longer under the dictatorship of the Medici or the madman, were free to govern themselves.
That was good news for artists. The newly elected government was eager to commission great works of art to glorify the city. One of those projects involved an enormous block of marble, affectionately named the Giant, which had been sitting in the work yard of the cathedral of Florence for over 30 years. It had been abandoned by an earlier sculptor who had blocked it out poorly, and since that time no one had known what to do with it. Now the city fathers were hoping to find a sculptor who could make something beautiful out of the misshapen block. Michelangelo knew he was the man they were looking for.
He returned to Florence and went before the cathedral board with his proposal. He probably showed them a drawing or a small clay model so they could see what his sculpture would look like. They were evidently impressed, because a short time later they announced that the Giant was his. A shed was built around the great block, so he could work in privacy, and on 13 September 1501, he began.
Michelangelo had chosen the perfect subject to show off his remarkable skills — the young David, in a moment of intense concentration, about to do battle with Goliath. He stands, resting on one leg, the other bent slightly. It is a pose out of ancient Greek sculpture, natural and graceful. Michelangelo knew his anatomy so well that his David is astonishingly real — except that he is 17 feet high and blessed with godlike beauty. This, of course, was exactly what Michelangelo intended: David’s physical perfection was merely the outward sign of his inner state of grace.
Michelangelo was already famous for his Pieta. The David established him as the greatest sculptor in all of Italy.
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September 23rd, 2010 at 12:49 am
[...] Michelangelo’s sculpture, David himself becomes the giant — his massive hands and forceful gaze symbolizing both his moral strength and his [...]