It was in 1504 with Michelangelo‘s gigantic marble David placed outside the door of Palazzo della Signoria, now Palazzo Vecchio, that the government of Florence allowed the taboo of nudity seen from the front to be completely overcome, so much so that it was exhibited in such a public important place.

And in fact in 1534 the naked David was flanked by Baccio Bandinelli’s Hercules subduing Cacus. Duke Cosimo I of the Medici had in fact chosen as his symbol no longer David, as had been done first by the Medici of the Cafaggiolo branch, then by the Florentine republic, but precisely by Hercules.

In 1554, the bronze of Perseus with the head of the Medusa by Benvenuto Cellini, also naked and with his genitals visible, was placed in the Loggia dei Lanzi; it had been chosen as a pendant of Donatello’s group of Judith and Holofernes previously seized from the garden of the Palazzo Medici in via Larga (now via Cavour) in 1494 as a trophy of the republican victory.
With the Medici’s return to power, the group was not removed, because the new rulers wanted them to be identified with the ancient Jewish heroine Judith and their republican adversaries identified with Israel’s enemy Holofernes.

Only in August 1583 was the bronze of Judith and Holofernes moved to make room for Giambologna’s colossal marble statue with three naked figures of both sexes entwined with violent sensuality. However, the positioning under the arch of the Loggia dei Lanzi, in the same point as the Judith, created limitations on the possibility of walking around the work, which was created to be seen at 360°.

Giambologna, after having created the life-size model, now kept in the Museum of the Academy of Florence, called in a series of assistants for the rough-hewing of the marble, first of all the French sculptor from Cambrai Pierre de Francqueville, whose name was Italianized as Pietro Francavilla.

Giambologna, actually the Frenchman Jean Boulogne born in Douai in Flanders in 1529, already renowned in his homeland as a skilled sculptor, probably came to Rome during the Jubilee of 1550 to learn about classical and Renaissance sculpture. He remained there to study for two years, creating a large quantity of sketches and models, most of which, in clay or wax, have come down to us. So much so that when Federico Zuccari painted his portrait in the 1570s, he put one of his sketches in his hand.

Shortly after arriving in Rome, Giambologna went to the almost eighty-year-old Michelangelo to show him a wax model of his that he had worked on with great passion and attention. Michelangelo, leaving him astonished, took him, crushed him, quickly reshaping him into a completely different figure, telling him “Now go first and learn to draft, and then to finish”.

Giambologna developed the idea for a sculpture of a man kidnapping a woman in 1579, and when the Grand Duke commissioned him to create a monumental marble group, the sculptor envisaged a third figure placed at the bottom to ensure stability for the two characters. In fact, he realized that the ankles of the standing man holding the suspended woman were too thin to support himself; he had had the same problem when he had created the Flying Mercury for the Farnese and in fact he was forced to have it cast in bronze, sturdier than marble, to allow the single foot resting on the base to support the sculpture.

He then inserted a third elderly man kneeling as support: we can see from the wax model of the Rape of the Sabine Women how the third kneeling character was modeled and added later.

Giambologna’s monumental work was a huge success, so much so that in 1583 the printer Bartolomeo Sermantelli published a volume with laudatory sonnets and engravings of the sculpture, followed in 1584 by a pamphlet by Grazio Grazi published by Giorgio Marescotti, entitled Rime e versi latini di Gratiamaria Gratii, on the rape of the Sabine women. Sculpted in marble by the excellent Giambologna.
In 1584 Raffaello Borghini, in his Il Riposo, narrates the story of the sculpture from its origin to the success of the work, saying that he himself suggested to Giambologna to title the gigantic group Rape of the Sabines as the most suitable subject for the work.

With the death in 1560 of Baccio Bandinelli, sculptor of the Medici court, a competition was announced for the execution of a large marble Neptune for the fountain to be created at the Palazzo della Signoria. Giambologna participated with a life-size clay model, but the winner was Ammannati.
Giambologna re-used his model, with modifications to transform it into the figure of the Ocean, for a fountain in the Boboli Gardens (now in the Bargello).
When a Flemish painter painted the portrait of Giambologna, he wanted the model of the Ocean to be seen from a window in the painting.

To please his protégé sculptor who had not won the competition for the Neptune fountain, Grand Duke Francesco I dei Medici commissioned him to create a colossal monument of Samson defeating the Philistine, sculpted in marble (kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum). Michelangelo had already set himself in motion when the Florentine Republic asked him for a group of two wrestlers to be positioned symmetrically to the David; the model that Michelangelo created on earth has fortunately come down to us preserved by the Casa Buonarroti.

Interesting is what Filippo Baldinucci writes in the “Notizie de’ professori del disegno” regarding the model that Giambologna had found for his great Roman of the Rape of the Sabine Women: Bartolomeo di Lionardo Ginori lived in Florence, a gigantic man “four whole arms tall” (2 .30 meters), warrior of fortune but pious and kind. Giambologna saw it in the church of San Giovannino dei Gesuiti and began to look at it without stopping. Lionardo kindly asked him what he wanted and Giambologna replied: “I seek nothing more from you than to observe the beautiful, or rather the marvelous, proportion of your figure; and since you so kindly invite me, I will go on to tell you about my need, and it is that since I, who am Gio. I could make some studies from your limbs… Ginori… immediately offered himself to his need; so the Sculptor was then able to personally make the studies and models he made for the figure of that robust young man.”
Giambologna, to thank him, gave him a bronze crucifix made by the well-known foundryman Alberghetti.

The figure of the biblical David has fascinated the Florentines in a particular way since the Middle Ages. In the Old Testament he is described very well, better than most other prophets have been. Among the peculiar characteristics of him at the moment in which he kills the giant Goliath six cubits and a palm tall is his young age, so much so that he cannot yet be part of the army, his lack of physical prowess, his intelligence that wins over brute force. He is not a saint, on the contrary he has the vices of men when he takes Bathsheba as wife of Uriah whom he then kills, he has corrupt and delinquent illegitimate children, except the wise Solomon. He defeats the Philistines allowing the birth of the Kingdom of Israel.

In the miniatures that decorate the medieval Bibles he is represented precisely as a young man with a slingshot that attacks and kills Goliath.

In the fourteenth century, in the bell tower of the Florence Cathedral, Andrea Pisano represented him as a prophet and king, not young but bearded, without slingshot or sword and without allusions to Goliath and his killing.
Even at the beginning of the Renaissance he is represented as an old bearded man who plays the zither, associating him with music.

But around 1330 in Florence in the fresco by Taddeo Gaddi, David appears for the first time young and beardless, in a short tunic, with the decapitated body of Goliath at his feet, and in his hand he holds the severed head of the slain Giant; in his other hand he has the sword with which he cut off his head and from his belt dangles the sling with a stone. This iconography in Florence will no longer be abandoned in Renaissance sculptures.

When Donatello sculpted the Marble David in 1409, a young man with the head of Goliath and a slingshot at his feet, he wanted to represent a clear response to the attacks on Florentine freedom: the Milanese tyrant Giangaleazzo Visconti was about to conquer Florence when he suddenly died.
In 1416 the statue was purchased by the Signoria of the Republic of Florence which brought it to Palazzo Vecchio. David becomes the defender of freedom and a symbol of divine help against enemies.
It was a very important step: David leaves the ecclesiastical sphere for the first time to become a civil hero. And when in 1390 the interior of Orsanmichele was frescoed at the expense of the Arts, David was again with his head uncovered, wearing a short tunic and a short cloak.

Donatello created a second David for the Medici cast in lost wax bronze, wanted to underline their great patriotism against any form of dictatorship. This time Donatello modeled him completely naked except for the shoes and the hat, a highly sensual figure, a sensuality that in a few years had been accepted and admired so much as to become a symbol, even if only civil, of youth and heroism.

However, especially in the religious sphere, David’s total nudity was partially censored, as in a miniature by Mariano del Buono from the late 1460s in a manuscript with psalms for Piero dei Medici: “he has a short dress that covers nudity but leaves his sensual legs visible, a belt hanging in front of his genitals, a sling in his left hand, a sword in his right, at his feet the bleeding head of Goliath”.

In the David panel of Ghiberti’s Gate of Paradise finished in 1452, in the center of the scene, below, David appears beheading the giant Goliath who was killed on the ground. He is also this young man and without a hat, he has the same shoes, but he is dressed.

From the second half of the 15th century the scene of David killing Goliath appears on chests, birth trays and other artefacts, in some cases he is fully clothed, in others he has only his legs uncovered. On a desco da parto (c. 1480) he is kneeling as he is about to decapitate the giant; on the first wedding chest (c. 1460) three moments are described: David with bare legs, short dress, shoes and cloak collects stones to throw with a slingshot; then David who is about to throw the stone with a sling against the giant Goliath; and in the center of the chest David beheads Goliath with the sword.
On the second chest David is triumphant in a chariot holding Goliath’s head by the hair.

In a parade shield painted by Andrea del Castagno around 1455. David is haired, dressed but with bare legs and holds the sling, and between his legs has the head of Goliath.

David’s images on artifacts of this type also tend to take on different meanings, such as courage and the valor of youth

Around 1475 Andrea del Verrocchio models and casts one of his Davids in lost wax bronze. It is natural that he looks at the elegant and admired bronze David created by Donatello. And he resumes the pose: the left arm bent and resting at his side, with the sword in the right hand, the weight of the body resting on the right leg and the left leg slightly bent. The novelty of the sculpture is the dynamism and the sense of life that Verrocchio manages to give to his David also using the sword that is kept filling the space away from the body.
His David is very young, his bare head has allowed the sculptor to give him a thick mane of hair, his mouth hints at a very slight smile of satisfaction, satisfaction also present in his gaze. Compared to Donatello’s hero, Verrocchio’s David is sunny, shrewd, more direct and certain.

He is not naked, but is clad in a thin (leather?) armor that perfectly follows his features and leaves his legs bare; he is no longer a shepherd in fact he wears a military-style robe and

the shoes are lower and less rich than those of Donatello.

Verrocchio modeled the head of Goliath so that it could be cast separately from the statue of David. In fact, it is probable that initially he had wanted to place it not between David’s legs but laterally to his right. In some manuscript miniatures, deriving from this David having the same type of armor that covers him, the head of the Goliath is placed to the side, something never happened before; in particular in the miniature of Mariano del Buono of 1465-1470 and that of Attavante of 1470-1480.

And again in the wedding chest of the Master of Stratonice from around 1470 the sculpture of David on the high base has the head of Goliath on the left side.

In the only drawing by Verrocchio’s workshop for the project, David is naked and there is no Goliath’s head.

E’ plausibile pensare che quando nel 10 maggio del 1476 la statua venne ceduta per 150 fiorini da Lorenzo e Giuliano dei Medici alla Signoria di Firenze, prezzo politico di grande favore (come ci dice il Gaye nel suo Carteggio inedito d’ artisti dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI) il Verrocchio abbia spostato la testa del David dal lato al centro delle gambe.

Piero dei Medici the Gouty on the death of his father Cosimo the Elder in 1464 took over the family business; it was then that his political enemies led by the Pitti family prepared a conspiracy to kill him in 1466, which Piero thwarted, capturing and exiling the organizers.
Very probably the figure of David by Verrocchio who kills the enemy by placing him in his own palace in via Larga where Donatello’s David was already on display in the courtyard was chosen as a symbol of Medici power.

The largest sculpture in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Piazza della Signoria is the Rape of the Sabines by Giambologna. Michelangelo’s powerful but slender David positioned near the Loggia in front of the Palazzo Vecchio nearby, exceeds five meters in height, and certainly was an incentive for Giambologna to create a monumental work 4.10 meters high.

These are three intertwined characters where a young Roman kidnaps one of the Sabine women by holding her up while trapping a frightened and desperate old man between his legs. The classic style with which Giambologna sculpts the work is in accordance with the myth of the “Rape of the Sabines” according to which the founder of Rome Romulus kidnaps the women of the nearby Sabina region by deception to procreate and populate the newborn city.

Although Giambologna preferred to make clay models to be cast in bronze with lost wax, he executed the work in a single monolithic block of marble which presents large masses and voids arranged asymmetrically while maintaining the ideal and real weight concentrated at the bottom; he was able to give the set of figures an “S” twist which allows the monument to have the innovative characteristic of three-dimensionality; in fact, it was made to be placed in the center of a space where it can be seen from all sides, as Michelangelo also claimed:

pyramidal figure, serpentine and multiplied by one, two and three […] because the greatest grace and prettiness that a figure can have is that it shows movement, which painters call fury of the figure […] and to represent this motion there is no it is a more adapted shape than that of the flame of the fire […] so that, when the figure has this shape, it will be beautiful,

as in fact Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo tells us in his “Treatise on the Art of Painting” of 1585.

Giambologna completed the execution of the work in 1583. It had been commissioned by the Grand Duke Francesco I dei Medici, as can be deduced from a letter that Simone Fortuna wrote to the Duke of Urbino on 17 October 1581 in which he informed him that a group would soon emerge of three statues opposite Donatello’s Judith in the Loggia dei Pisani [the Judith was then placed in the Loggia dei Lanzi].
The sculpture was signed with the inscription “OPVS IOANNIS BOLONII FLANDRI MDLXXXII” [by Giovanni de Boulogne of Flanders, 1582].

The Grand Duke Ferdinando I dei Medici found the work beautiful and, as Raffaello Borghini writes in his “Il Riposo” of 1584, wanted to have it placed in the Loggia dei Lanzi.
It is curious how Giambologna wrote on 13 June 1579 to the Duke of Parma Ottavio Farnese that with this work he wanted to “give space to the wisdom and study of art”, that is to express the strength of love of the young lover, the beauty of the beloved woman, and the desperation of her old husband. And thanks to the classical sculptural style, nudity did not offend the sensitivity of the Catholic Reform. Nothing to do, however, with the “Rape of the Sabines”.

But Raffaello Borghini confirms that originally Giambologna wanted to sculpt three figures that interacted in movement with each other, and that however he made the sculptor change his mind, and in fact he writes:

“he was told, I don’t know by whom, that it would have been well done, to continue the story of Perseus by Benvenuto [a work by Benvenuto Cellini present under the Loggia dei Lanzi] that he had pretended for the kidnapped girl Andromeda wife of Perseus, for her kidnapper Fineo, her uncle, and for the old Cepheus, father of Andromeda.But one day Raffaello Borghini having come to Giambologna’s workshop, and having seen to his great delight this beautiful group of figures and understood the story, that must have meant, he showed signs of amazement, of which Giambologna realizing, begged him a lot to give him his opinion on this, who concluded that in no way should he give that name to his statues, but that would be better the Rape of the Sabine Women; which story having been judged apt, gave its name to the work.“

Giambologna executed, as almost all sculptors used to do, a model in clay or raw earth, which fortunately was not destroyed and which is kept in the Academy of Florence.
From the clay model, which was particularly fragile and friable when dry, a plaster positive was normally drawn, more resistant than raw clay, used as a reference for sculpting the work in marble. A plaster model, probably the original by Giambologna, was found in the early 1900s by Marino Marinelli, father of Ferdinando Marinelli Jr.

One of the assistants of Giambologna’s studio for the marble sculpture of the mammoth work was Pietro Francavilla (Italianized name of Pierre de Franqueville) who worked on it since 1574.
When the title of The Rape of the Sabine Women became definitive, Giambologna executed a bronze bas-relief to be affixed to the base which made it clear the subject of the monument, as Cellini had done for the base of the Perseus.

There is no news on how Michelangelo worked to arrive at the finished David. We only know that the block entrusted to him had already been badly rough-hewn by others to make a giant prophet to be placed on the spurs of the Cathedral, without ever being finished.
However, Michelangelo managed to “pull” out of the block the David, one of the marvels of the Renaissance, of perfect proportions.

Normally the sculptors followed (and in some sculpture studios they still follow) a particular process, which even Michelangelo would have followed if the block of marble had been virgin, which consisted of various phases:

the first was a visit to the Carrara marble quarry, in this case the Fantiscritti quarry, to look for and choose the right block for the sculpture to be made; the block had to be of white marble without veins and without visible nor hidden cracks. Only quarrymen and sculptors with great experience were able to understand, from the outside of the block, how it appeared inside.

Once the perfect block was found, the sculptor sketched the volumes that the finished sculpture would have had on all its sides, in black chalk or red chalk, then asking the quarryman to roughly shape the block by removing the unnecessary ones.

The block, brought from the quarry to the port on carts pulled by a few pairs of oxen, was loaded onto a robust boat which, in the case of Florence, sailed up the Arno from its mouth near Pisa to a port near the city, normally the port of Signa. Here it was again loaded onto a cart pulled by oxen and taken to the sculptor’s studio. For the block entrusted to Michelangelo, the phase of choosing the marble and transporting it to the courtyard of the Opera del Duomo in Florence was not followed by Michelangelo but by others.

Despite what he made Condivi write for his autobiography, where Michelangelo claims to have always faced marble directly without drawings or sketches or clay models, normally he too, like the other sculptors, performed all of the above.

To understand the work required to make a marble sculpture, we can follow the creation of a full-size marble replica of David. Instead of the clay model presumably modeled by Michelangelo, a positive plaster model is used, made from the negative cast taken from the original work.

This is placed next to the marble block.

A first rough cut of the volumes is made.

The ancient system of the manual pantograph is still used, called in the sculptors’ jargon “macchinetta”, a system already practiced by Greek and Roman sculptors. It consists of transferring three-dimensional points taken from the plaster model onto the raw marble. The greater the number of points reported, the greater the fidelity of the marble sculpture.

In this way we proceed to eliminate the excess marble layer after layer, getting closer and closer to the model, and the sculpture goes on by layers until the work is perfectly equal to the original.

Obviously, when the sculptor performs his sculpture, he creates clay models with few details, which he will sculpt directly on the marble.

When all the volumes are finished, which for the replica means that they are identical to the original, the work of smoothing and finishing the surfaces begins, performed with special files and emery paper; Michelangelo also often worked the surfaces of his works with ever finer steps (chisels), deliberately leaving the relative signs visible.

Catalogue: The David by Michelangelo

Duke Cosimo I had commissioned the construction of the Biancone fountain at the north-east corner of Palazzo Vecchio, so that the central figure of Neptune would be in line with the other large statues of Michelangelo’s David and Hercules and Cacus of Bandinelli.

The project for a fountain in Piazza della Signoria is mentioned for the first time in a letter from Bandinelli to Jacopo Guidi dated March 1550.
In 1559 Vasari went to Rome and proposed Ammannati’s project to Michelangelo, in which Neptune has his arms raised.

As can also be seen on a medal by Pier Paolo Galeotti from 1565 relating to the project for the fountain, Neptune actually has his arms raised.

With Michelangelo’s consent it was easy to convince Cosimo I to assign the task of the fountain to Ammannati (also because Bandinelli had died in 1560) who gave a quick look at Cellini’s project but without even looking at the projects of other competitors such as Giambologna, Danti (and perhaps Vincenzo de’Rossi and Simone Mosca).
The marble Neptune was executed with his arms lowered: even so Ammannati did not sculpt it in a single block but several parts of marble joined together.

Cosimo I wanted most of the basin and the marble decorations to be done with the “Mischio di Seravezza” marble with violet inclusions, a quarry of his exclusive property and use.

Four bronze figures were placed at the four corners of the marble basin, two Satyrs and two Naiads (in reality they are Nereids, nymphs of the sea); and in fact Domenico Mellini (1566) speaks of Nereids, Raffaello Borghini (1584) writes that “the two females” were depicted for Thetis and for Doris.
In fact, Thetis has a shield as her attribute, with reference to her gift that she gave to her son Achilles. The attributes of the other Nereid (Doris), in addition to the dolphin, a buccina and a queen’s diadem, identify her as Amphitrite, wife of Neptune and therefore queen of the sea.

They are mannerist reworkings of the two marine deities whose proportions seem to draw inspiration from the school of Fontanebleau, of which many engravings were widespread at the time of Ammannati: in particular, the famous shield of Achilles described by Homer in the Iliad is wholly symbolic, in fact it presents a battle generic in bas-relief conducted with rapid style, of great spontaneity and in some places just mentioned.

If in the past the execution of the two Nereids, later renamed “Naiads”, had been attributed to various mannerist sculptors, and in particular to Giambologna, critics have long since attributed them to Ammannati, as well as the two Satyrs.

For Hitler’s visit to Florence in 1938, cleaning and restoration interventions were ordered, in particular of the bronzes present in Piazza Signoria, followed by podestà Paolo Venerosi Pesciolini and cared for by the municipal architect Alfredo Lenzi. They were thus cleaned up by Ferdinando Marinelli Sr., founder of the homonymous Artistic Foundry; on that occasion Marinelli asked and obtained permission to make negative moulds directly on the originals.
Those moulds then passed to his nephew Ferdinando Marinelli Jr. thanks to whom the identical copies of Ammannati’s “Naiads” exhibited in the Bazzanti Gallery on Lungarno Corsini were made.

Michelangelo had a splendid life but also a very difficult one, which he often complained about: discouragement due to body fatigue, lack of friends of any kind, political and religious crises, extreme avarice towards himself and his others (but not with family members he felt guilty towards) so much so that he fled Florence while he was directing the fortification works for the nearby siege of the city, for fear of seeing his own money taken to support the expenses of the war, from the passion senile for the young and beautiful Tomaso Cavalieri, to the spiritual love for Vittoria Colonna.

At the same time his art was immediately admired and venerated by his contemporaries, it fascinated the great personalities he commissioned, historians, his disciples and contemporary and subsequent artists. His life was written by the biographers Giovio, Vasari, Condivi while he was still alive. He was admired by Cellini, Tintoretto, Buontalenti, Greco.

His sculptural style is the watershed between the Renaissance, of which it is the ripe fruit, and the beginning of Mannerism. In the unscrupulous use of the “unfinished” Michelangelo brings an impressive modernity to sculpture for the first time, both unresearched as in the works he actually could not or did not want to finish, and where he used it in the works in which unfinished areas deliberately appear alongside finished and polished areas.
Many hypotheses have been made to explain the meaning of this way of sculpting, and still the critics do not agree. The fact remains that it creates deep sensations and emotions in the viewer.

When Michelangelo dictated his autobiography to Condivi, he wanted to highlight that he always did everything alone without help, even the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, and even alone he declares that he never used the normal methods that sculptors have always used: he left almost no preparatory drawings for his sculptures, having burned them all before he died, he never made clay models, even if there is a life-size clay and wax model of his at the Academy of Design Arts.

For the David the situation in which Michelangelo found himself was different, the block of marble had already been roughed out even if badly. Michelangelo had to think the shape of his David forced from the existing blank. However, he was able to perform perhaps his greatest masterpiece even with these difficulties.
David is the young biblical hero who, challenging the giant warrior Goliath to a duel, kills him with a stone thrown with a slingshot and then takes him off with his sword, making the Israeli army led by King Saul win against the Philistines.
Michelangelo sculpts him with the stone still to be thrown, Goliath is still alive; in the two Davids by Donatello, the one in marble and the one in bronze, Goliath was killed and his head was cut off, the sword also appears in the bronze, as well as in that of Verrocchio.

The Florentine Republic was led albeit indirectly by the Medici family, who always found it prudent to highlight and insist on freedom from tyranny.
Already in 1416 the Signoria of Florence had purchased the marble David that Donatello had sculpted in 1408 placing it in the Sala dell’ Orologio of Palazzo Vecchio, a symbol of freedom against any dictator. At his feet he had carved the inscription Pro patria fortiter dimicantibus etiam adversus terribilissimos hostes Dii prestant auxilium, i.e. The gods give support to those who fight vigorously for their country even against the most formidable enemies.
Cosimo the Elder also wanted the statue of a bronze David for his courtyard of Palazzo Medici in via Larga to underline how the Medici too were advocates of freedom against tyranny, and asked Donatello for it who sculpted a more pagan and naked David which we know to have been in 1469 in his Palace. However, when the Medici were expelled from the city in 1495, the people who raided the Palazzo transported the statue to Palazzo Vecchio as a symbol of the freedom of the Republic.

The message of Michelangelo’s David was the same: God would protect the city of Florence and its Republican government based in Palazzo Vecchio from any enemy of freedom.
Michelangelo’s David is a completely naked young man, and it is the first time since Rome that a large statue has been executed completely naked.
The pose of resting the weight on one of the two legs, which leaves the other free as in the classical heroes at rest, which happens to the various Davids, derives from classical art and also reappears from the little Hercules symbolizing the Force, present in the pulpit of the Baptistery of Pisa, sculpted by Nicola Pisano.

When in 1537 Cosimo I dei Medici becomes Duke of the Republic of Florence, he chooses to change the symbol, no longer the republican David, but Hercules against whose strength it is useless to fight.
He has the statue of Hercules who conquers Cacus sculpted and, while leaving Michelangelo’s David in its place, he places it on the other side of the Porta del Palazzo Vecchio, the meaning of which is clear: God is no longer with the Republic, now he is Hercules , symbol of Cosimo, and of the new branch of the Medici, which commands.

It was Cosimo dei Medici the Elder who, around 1440, commissioned Donatello to create a bronze statue of David cast in lost wax.
In 1420 his father Giovanni di Bicci dei Medici, founder of the Banco dei Medici and great patron of art in Florence, left the management of his activities to Cosimo dei Medici the Elder, who was as skilled as or more than his father, enormously expanded the circle of business by opening branches of the Medici Bank in most of Europe. Politically shrewd, he managed to win the favor of the antipope John XXIII, and Pope Martin V who replaced him in 1417, requested a large loan from the Banco dei Medici, and Cosimo granted it to him: friendship with the current pope was very important for the Banco dei Medici.

Upon the death of his father Giovanni di Bicci in 1429, Cosimo managed to create a pro-Medici party in the government of the city which was an enemy of the oligarchic faction headed by the Albizi through alliances and marriages with the great families such as the Tornabuoni, the Salviati, the Bardi, the Cavalcanti. He managed to appear pro-popular while simultaneously transforming the Medici family from nouveau riche to aristocracy.
Having failed in 1430 the plan of the oligarchic government of the Florentine Republic to have Cosimo exiled from Florence on various pretexts, due to the opposition of Niccolò da Uzzano, when Uzzano died in 1433 they managed to have Cosimo imprisoned by accusing him of wanting to become dictator of Florence.

In prison he was isolated, but he bribed the warden Federico Malavolti who allowed him to warn his party which organized a popular uprising, and the oligarchic government of Rinaldo degli Albizi was forced to let him out, condemning him to exile from the city.
Cosimo with a crowd of friends and servants stopped in Venice, where he lived as a great lord, controlling and directing the government of Florence: in 1434 he had a group of pro-Medicean rulers appointed who had him recalled to Florence; Cosimo in turn had his enemies exiled.
It was from the Palazzo Medici in via Larga, designed by Michelozzo, that he managed city politics, extorting his enemies with the taxman and always making sure that in the government of Florence there was a majority of men who strictly trusted him.

The bronze David was modeled and cast in bronze with lost wax method by Donatello around 1435-1440, before the artist was called to Padua in 1443 to sculpt Christ and the bas-reliefs for the altar of the Basilica of S. Antonio in Padua and then the monument to Gattamelata.

It is assumed that it was placed in the great hall on the first floor (piano nobile) and in 1457 (or in any case before the arrival in Florence in 1459 of Galeazzo Maria Sforza hosted in the Palazzo and of Pope Pius II Piccolomini) it was brought to the courtyard of Palazzo Medici , which Cosimo was furnishing, and placed in the center on a red porphyry column probably salvaged and adapted from Rome, in turn resting on a white marble base sculpted by Desiderio da Settignano with four harpies at the corners. In David the thick bronze crown of oak leaves at the base framed the support of the bronze to the marble of the column.
A reconstruction of the base was made in fiberglass by the Bargello Museum and is the one shown here in the photographs

The height of about 160 cm of the bronze together with that of the base made it possible to reach a total height of about 3.5 meters. And in fact the work was created to be looked at from below. Gentile Becchi, an educator who lived in Palazzo Medici, dictated an epigraphic inscription that accompanied the David:
“Victor est quisquis patriam tuetur. / Frangit immanis Deus hostis iras. / En puer grandem domuit tiramnum./ Vincite cives!”
“Whoever defends his country is bound to win, / for God breaks the furious resolves of the most fearsome of enemies. / Here is the boy who defeated a huge tyrant. Citizens, to victory!” (Caglioti 2000, p. 205);
the epigraph makes David a heroic symbol of great political as well as moral strength. With the door of the building open, it was visible to all who passed in front of it (as Marco Parenti underlined in his letter of 1469 where he describes the marriage of Lorenzo the Magnificent to Clarice Orsini sent to Filippo Strozzi in Naples).
When the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1495, the Florentine Republic, which had requisitioned the family’s homes, took possession of their works of art in the Palazzo Medici, including the David di Donatello, which they transferred to the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Priori.
In 1511 the David was struck by lightning, and from that moment on he appeared and disappeared from the courtyard of Palazzo Vecchio: in 1555, when Duke Cosimo I and his family lived in the Palazzo Vecchio, the David was removed from the courtyard and was closed in a warehouse; it was replaced by the Putto with the Dolphin executed in bronze by Verrocchio taken from the Medici villa of Careggi, and was placed on the porphyry fountain created by Francesco del Tadda in the center of the courtyard.
The David reappeared with its column base in the courtyard in 1570 in a niche in the east porch, but in 1592 it was again removed and replaced by Pierino da Vinci’s Samson on the Philistine.
Until 1638 we do not know where it was, the year in which it appears, according to the inventories of Palazzo Pitti, in the Sala Bianca. It then reappears when it is transferred in 1778 to the Uffizi gallery.
Finally in 1865 it was housed in the Bargello, transformed into the National Museum and here it stopped.
David is a naked youth with one foot on the severed head of the Giant Goliath. The naked body is flaunted in the attitude of a winner; he wears a laurel-wreathed Mercury-like brimmed hat with a lost plume cap; at his feet he has ancient-type footwear, in his right hand he holds a large flat-pointed sword that rests on Goliath’s helmet, in his left a sling stone. Goliath has a winged helmet where a bas-relief appears on the visible side. David’s sword indicates precisely the small bas-relief which therefore probably highlights the “moral” of the entire sculpture. It represents a chariot pulled by two winged and naked putti; on the chariot is enthroned a wingless figure who receives gifts from two other winged putti; behind the throne appears a naked and fat character without wings who has an amphora at his feet. The scene seems to be taken from an ancient Roman gem, probably from the Medici collection; it is probable that the seated figure is Bacchus accompanied by Silenus, and that the winged putto is offering him a cup of wine. Being on Goliath’s helmet, it could be the representation of incontinence, pride and arrogance, vices associated with Goliath (and the tyrannical enemies of Florence) conquered by the virtue of David (the Republic of Florence, crypto-managed by Cosimo).

That it was placed high above the column is proven by many details: his head and gaze are turned downwards, the only way to be able to see his face, but also by a series of anatomical irregularities, such as the shoulder blades and lowered buttocks in the flattened and then broken backside and in all the angular joints that Donatello performed as an optical correction for the high placement of the statue, the strong rotation of Goliath’s head to make the plate with the cherubs visible, many unfinished parts that would have been hidden by the garland protruding on the base. Comparing the impression of David at eye level with the same place above, completely changes the grandeur and vigor of the character and the meaning of the helmeted head of Goliath.

The David, which had been commissioned by a private individual, would be displayed so high in a private home, Donatello sculpted the nude David for the first time. His childhood, his sanctity, humility and warrior heroism would have saved Donatello and the client any suspicion of heterodoxy. Donatello was also inspired by classical sculpture, almost always nude. Only after a few generations, with Michelangelo, did another completely naked David appear.
The David is one of the less successful castings from a technical point of view: it has many cold-assembled plugs to correct the deficiencies, it has various cracks, parts which were not reached by the bronze during the casting, the need for remelting to reconstruct parts that did not come (clearly visible is the crown of the hat, the back of the helmet of Goliath, part of the base wreath, lack of fusion under the chin). The many movements of the statue have caused other damages probably also due to falls, such as the breakage and loss of a lock of hair on the left shoulder.

In a letter from Gentile Becchi, tutor in the Medici house and friend of Lorenzo the Magnificent, a fitting judgment appears on the type of work by Donatello:

…Contende la magnificentia con l’ utilità, l’ utilità chol p[iacere] et novità… ma perché l’ oficio mio con Voi è asuto più riprendere che lodare, un [man]camento vi viddi, et questo è quello hebbe Donatello et qualunque ha più inventio[n]e [e sa] bozzare più che finire, ordire più che essere patiente a tessere. (ASF, Mediceo avanti il Principato, XXXVII, 489)

And in fact Donatello took care of the final effect of his sculptures so that they gave the viewer the effect he had wanted, without wasting too much time on details and finishes, because he believed the rough and unfinished surface would have given greater strength and expressiveness to his works.
A very interesting detail is the cold scratching of a large part of the surface of the sculpture, probably to limit its reflections.

The hair, spared from the rain thanks to the visor of his hat, tells us that in many parts Donatello had highlighted some parts of the work with gold leaf (“a missione”), as he did for example in Attis.