The Keystone · Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1501–1504
David
The block was seventeen feet of 'spoiled' Carrara marble — quarried forty years earlier, gouged by two other sculptors, abandoned in a cathedral yard. Michelangelo, twenty-six, asked for it anyway.
His David is not the victor with Goliath's head underfoot; he is the moment before. The weight rocks back on the right leg, the sling drapes the shoulder, the brow tightens. Look at the right hand — oversized, veins standing, the only confession of nerves in the whole figure.
He stood in the open Piazza della Signoria for three and a half centuries, weathering, until 1873, when the city walked him indoors to the Accademia and built a skylight over his head.