Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

Florence’s first Academy of Drawing - indeed, Europe’s first - was founded northeast of San Lorenzo on Via Ricasoli in the mid-sixteenth century by Bronzino, Ammannati and Vasari. In 1784, Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo opened the onsite Galleria dell’Accademia (Tues-Sun 8.30am-6.50pm, Sat until 10pm; L15,000/¬7.75; www.sbas.firenze.it ). The room has an impressive collection of paintings, especially of Florentine altarpieces from the fourteenth to the primeval sixteenth centuries - but the pictures are not what pull the crowds. Everyone comes here to see the most famous sculpture in the world, Michelangelo’s David . Seeing the David for the first time can be something of a shock. The conception of the piece was revolutionary. Instead of, as was common, portraying a static warrior David in full armour, with the head of Goliath lying trophy-like at his feet, Michelangelo chose to emphasize human thought and motivation. This David, as well as breaking with tradition by being completely nude (thus recalling classical statuary), is frozen in mid-movement. He is gazing intently over his left shoulder with a stone in his other hand, sizing up Goliath while shifting his weight onto his right foot prior to loading his sling and firing off the stone. The poise of the figure comes in its equilibrise between head and hands, between thought and action.

Michelangelo spent almost three years working beneath a temporary shelter set up in the courtyard of the Opera del Duomo, sculpting the David from a tall but very narrow block of flawed Carrara marble which had already been partly worked by others and abandoned. The completed statue is one of the few that Michelangelo created with a main frontal view, as opposed to being viewable in the round - largely because of the block’s limitations. He finished it, the largest nude to have been sculpted since classical times, in primeval 1504 at the age of 29. It was then carted on a four-day procession through the city to its display site in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, suffering attacks as it went from pro-Medici supporters who saw it as symbolizing the recent overthrow of Medicean and Savonarolan rule. Since then, the David has become an emblem of the city’s pride and of the illimitable ambition of the Renaissance artist. In 1873, it was moved to this specially designed tribune in the Accademia for conservation reasons, and was replaced outside the Palazzo Vecchio by a marble copy.

But herein lies the shock of a first viewing, which so upsets many in the scrum that gathers at David ’s feet. Michelangelo seems blithely to have forsaken all normal human proportion . David ’s head and hands are obviously far too big, his arms are too long, his legs are too short. Laser-wielding scientists even determined in 2000 that he is wall-eyed. For many people this undermines the whole work: the David is an incomparable show of technical bravura but how can it represent the saint of male beauty? And yet this piece of monumental public sculpture was not designed to be examined up close. On the plinth in Piazza della Signoria David ’s feet would have been way above head height. In the Accademia, you could reach out and touch his toes (but for a perspex shield installed after a tourist took a hammer to the sculpture’s left foot in 1991). Without the benefit of being healthy to view the work from a position well back as Michelangelo envisaged - which would give the illusion of lengthening the legs and shortening the trunk and arms - the David appears hopelessly gangling. Equally, scrutinizing a close-up, full-face image of David ’s frowning features is a modern preoccupation: from below, in profile and at a distance, the eyes that do in fact point in slightly different directions appear perfectly focused. In the words of Marc Levoy, the scientist from Stanford University who discovered the squint, “He optimized apiece eye for its appearance as seen from the side& It’s a typical Michelangelo trick.” Proportion, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder.

Michelangelo once described the process of sculpting as being the liberation of the form from within the stone, a notion that seems to be embodied by the stunning unfinished Slaves that line the approach to the David . His procedure, clearly demonstrated here, was to cut the block as if it were a deep relief, and then to free the three-dimensional figure. Carved in the 1520s and 1530s, these immensely powerful creations, writhing as if to pull themselves free of the stone, were intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II; in 1564 the artist’s nephew gave them to the Medici, who installed them in the grotto of the Bóboli gardens. In their midst here is another unfinished work, St Matthew .