PICTURE THE SCENE: the year is 1504 in Florence and young Michelangelo Buonarotti has been in the city for a couple of years working on an extraordinary commission. A huge block of marble has slowly been sculpted into the Biblical figure of David, a project just finished. Michelangelo, always happiest with chisel in hand, declared, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”
The gigantic figure, 17 feet high, was “very much seen as a metaphor for Florence, a small but grand Republic, fighting and winning,” according to Julien Domercq, curator of the Royal Academy’s new exhibition Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael 1504. “Big both in size and significance, a piece of propaganda,” the brilliance of David was realised immediately,…
