It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David. – Michelangelo

Perhaps for a master sculptor like Michelangelo, it was easy to carve David from a single block of marble. However, for mere mortals such as me, it was a breathtaking day on my honeymoon when, after lining up in the cold outside of the Galleria Dell’ Accademia di Firenze with my wife for an hour and a half, with the last Siberian blast of arctic frost gnawing away at my bones, mumbling my consternation about the advice we had received from a friend in Australia that early March in Italy would be like a Brisbane winter, which was where my warm long-johns laid in the wardrobe drawers as my manhood turned blue, I finally came in from the cold. And I was grateful to gaze upon one of the most exquisite items of Renaissance sculpture. One truly cannot reduce to words the exhilaration your artistic senses deep inside your heart and mind experience as you gaze at this 517-centimetre work of genius. Perhaps it was a masterpiece like David that William Blake had in mind when he scribbled in the third verse of the opening stanza of Auguries of Innocence the inconceivable poetic metaphor of: Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand.

Michelangelo’s David embodies far more than the youth who defeated Goliath. David is emblematic of the soul of Firenze itself at that moment in history: courageous, intelligent and indomitable. David is the first colossal marble statue carved during the High Renaissance and the first since classical antiquity, setting a precedent for the sixteenth century and eternity. The history of David began long before Michelangelo’s commission in 1501, as the decision was made during the early period of the Florentine Republic, after the Medici were expelled from Florence, to commission a sculpture symbolising the young, vital, and confident new dawn of the republic. Indeed, originally, the Operai del Duomo (the Florentine Office of Works) had commissioned Agostino in 1464 to create a marble sculpture of the young David, and rather than carving it from three stones as the Operai had urged him to do so, in 1465 Agostino himself travelled to Carrara, a town in the Apuan Alps, and acquired a very large block of bianco ordinario from the Fantiscritti quarry. It seems Agostino had only made a rudimentary start to carving the statue when, for reasons which cannot be explained, his work came to a grinding halt, and he proceeded no further. Antonio Rossellino, also a Florentine, was commissioned in 1476 to resume the work, but the contract was apparently rescinded, and the block lay neglected for another twenty-five years. Cometh the man, cometh the hour, and after the Operai had consulted people such as Leonardo da Vinci, along came a twenty-six-year-old Michelangelo, and on 16 August 1501, he was commissioned to sculpt the colossal figure the Operai had envisaged for almost five decades.

Michelangelo commenced carving one month later. The contract provided him with a workspace in the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore behind the Duomo. He was paid a salary of six Fiorini per month, and his work had to be completed within two years- no pressure, lads! Yet he finished it within the time provided. When the finished statue was moved from the Opera del Duomo to the Piazza della Signoria over the course of four days, as reported by two contemporary diarists, Luca Landucci and Pietro di Marco Parenti, a guard was placed to protect it from violence by other artists in Florence who had hoped for the commission. However, jealousy is a curse, and as a result of reckless vandalism, the back of David was damaged when several youths from prominent Florentine families, unforgivingly, threw stones at the magnificent sculpture. To this day, the marks of those stones remain.

In his inimitable artistic genius, Michelangelo considered a single block of stone to embrace every conception for a work of art. He believed that the artist’s duty was to sculpt the marble to reveal the ideal form within, an indelible expression of his Neo-Platonic ethos that the body and mind are separate. They must work contemporaneously and to attain a singular union, and, of course, with the divine. In later life, speaking of sculpting masterpieces, Michelangelo contended that he was merely liberating figures already present in the stone, and that he envisaged them in his mind’s eye.

So, there I stood in the Galleria Dell’ Accademia di Firenze, and the cold did not seem to be a feature of my consciousness anymore as I gazed upon the imposing David, and from there on, and until the day I am no more, I will always be in awe.