The Davids of the World :: essays papers

The Davids of the WorldSometime soon after the year 1430, a bronze statue of David stood in the courtyard of the house of the Medici. The work was commissioned of Donatello by Cosimo dMedici himself, the founding father of the Republic of Florence. It was the first free-standing, life sized nude person since classical victorious athletes of Greece and Rome. But soft, and some how oddly unheroic. And the incongruity of the heads of haircloth and shaded by a laurel-crowned peasants hat Goliaths tragic, contorted expression, made sharper by the pentagonal helmet and coarse, disheveled beard. Innocence and evil. The weak triumphing over the strong. The city of Florence triumphing over the aggressive dukes of Milan? David as a civic-public monument. In the year 1469, Ser Piero from the Tuscan town of Vinci moved to Florence to become a notary. He rented a house on the Piazza San Firenze, not far from the Palazzo Vecchio. His son, who was a mere 17 geezerhood old upon their arrival, began and apprenticeship in the Florentine studio of the well known creative person, Andrea Verrocchio. At this time, Veracchio was at work on a bronze sculpture of the youthfulness David. Might the head of this fine piece be a portrayal of the young Leonardo da Vinci?For many years a stymie of marble lay untouched, tossed aside as unusable, irretrievable evidence of a botched attempt to carve a human form. It was eighteen feet high. A young sculptor, 26 years old, riding high after the awful success of his figure of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ, trenchant to ask for the piece. The wardens of the city in charge of such things let the artist have it. What did they have to lose? Getting anything out of it was better than nothing. So this young sculptor named Michelangelo measured and calculated. He mad a get up model of David with a sling in his hand. And he worked on his David constantly for some three years, until, a man named Vasari tells us, he brought it to p erfect completion. Without let anyone see it. A century later, a young sculptor, 25 years old, stares into a mirror at his steeled jaw and determined brow. A coeval source tells us that on this day, perhaps, the mirror is being held by underlying Maffeo Berberini while Bernini transfers what he sees in himself to the face of his David.