David’s Sling

Generations of masters chipped tentatively at the block, but proved unable to confidently project a successful figure onto it.

The stone was very tall but narrow, and given the brittle nature of marble, a human form would be likely to break at the ankles. One after another, aspiring sculptors gave up. Now the block was little more than a curiosity piece. Some observers described it as a cadaver, and wondered if the best thing wouldn’t be to break it up into more manageable pieces.

One boy who arrived in Florence in the early 1480s was secretly pleased that no one was trying to carve the block anymore. Solitary and somewhat unpleasant, he had few friends and no one minded that he spent his free time with a piece of marble. For his part, he found the block a good companion that held limitless secrets. He knew it wasn’t dead.

Nothing about the young Michelangelo Buonarroti foretold a great future. His mother had died when he was an infant and his father, after failing at the family business of banking, had left their small town and moved to Florence to become a bureaucrat. Michelangelo had been left to the care of servants until his father sent for him with the intent of making a bureaucrat of him as well.

The Florence Michelangelo encountered was a synergistic hive of political, economic and cultural freedom that allowed the city to exert an international influence disproportionate to its relatively small size. Florence’s status as a republic was a point of great civic pride, differentiating the city from duchies such as Urbino, Mantua and Milan, as well as from the great Papal center of Rome. Even Venice (rightly) viewed Florence’s expanding power as challenge to La Serenissima’s claim to be the dominant republic in Italy. This rivalry played out not only in counting houses and even in the occasional military skirmish, but also in artistic circles as Florence emerged as the epicenter of Renaissance culture. The roll-call of genius attracted by the city’s liberty and prosperity was already legendary: Dante, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, and most recently Leonardo da Vinci. But the greatest was still to come as in 1501 man and marble met at a crucial moment for Florentine independence to produce Michelangelo’s David.