David and Goliath

In 1547 the Florentine scholar Benedetto Varchi asked the leading artists of the day whether painting or sculpture was the nobler art. One point for sculpture was that you can walk around a statue. A few years later Giovanni della Casa, a churchman best remembered for his book on good manners, the Galateo, set out to write a treatise on painting. According to Vasari, he had Daniele model a David in clay and then paint the same figure on both faces of a single slab of slate, once from the front and once from behind. The design goes back to drawings by Daniele's friend Michelangelo, and when the slab was given to Louis XIV in 1715 it arrived as a Michelangelo. In room 712 it stands free of the wall, so you can walk around it and see the fight twice.