David

In August 1501 the cathedral works office of Florence handed Michelangelo, then 26, a block of marble that had already beaten two sculptors. Agostino di Duccio and later Antonio Rossellino had started roughing it out decades earlier and abandoned it. The plan was a giant David for one of the buttresses high on the outside of the cathedral. By January 1504, with the figure nearly done, a panel of the city's leading artists, Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli among them, chose a different spot, and that September the statue was unveiled in Piazza della Signoria, at the door of the Palazzo Vecchio, as an emblem of the republic's strength. Some parts were gilded then, a garland in the hair, the sling over the shoulder and the tree stump behind the right leg. The statue stood outdoors for almost 370 years. In August 1873 it was moved here and waited nine years in a wooden crate while the architect Emilio De Fabris finished this skylit Tribune around it. Since 1910 a marble copy has stood in its old place in the square.