Michelangelo freed David from a ruined block by 1504
Michelangelo’s marble David, carved 1501–1504, stands 5.17 metres and was the High Renaissance’s first colossal marble statue of its kind. Florence already loved the biblical youth as a civic emblem of liberty under the 1494 republican constitution. The Operai del Duomo had nursed the commission for generations before he began.
Donatello’s 1410 terracotta Joshua opened an earlier colossal series for the cathedral. In 1464 Agostino di Duccio was hired to cut a multi-piece marble David for the Duomo’s east end; the project stalled. A 1500 workshop inventory listed a badly blocked, supine marble figure called David. In 1501 the Arte della Lana consuls and Overseers chose Michelangelo to finish that stubborn stone, a nine-braccia slab of ordinary-grade white marble from the old Roman Fantiscritti quarry at Carrara rather than the prized statuario.
He started at dawn on 13 September, a month after the contract, earning six fiorini monthly in a yard behind the Duomo. Scaffolding let him reach the upright block, and he forged his own steel chisels, roughing out with the heavy pointed subbia and finishing almost entirely with toothed tools; researchers spotted those marks during the 2003 restoration. His Neo-Platonic habit treated the block as already holding the ideal form, cutting the highest relief first as Vasari later described on the Prisoners.
By 25 January 1504 it was plain that a statue of roughly 8.5 tons could not be hauled onto the cathedral roof. A committee of 30 citizens debated where it should go; Giuliano da Sangallo, backed by Leonardo and Piero di Cosimo, wanted it sheltered in the Loggia dei Lanzi because of flaws in the stone. Diarists Luca Landucci and Pietro di Marco Parenti record a four-day haul to the Piazza della Signoria under armed guard against vandals.
Mounted in the civic square rather than high on the cathedral, the shepherd-giant became Florence’s public face—proof that republican nerve and one rescued slab could outlast the Medici threat that framed the commission.
Source: David (Michelangelo)
