David is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture created in marble by the Italian artist Michelangelo between 1501 and 1504. David is a 5.17 m (17.0 ft) marble statue.
David was originally commissioned as one of a series of statues of prophets to be placed on the roof of the east end of the Florence cathedral, but was instead placed in a public square outside the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of Florence's civil government. On September 8, 1504, the Piazza della Signoria was unveiled. The statue was moved to the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence in 1873 and was later replaced by a replica in its original location.
Because of the nature of the hero it represented, the statue soon came to symbolize the protection of civil liberties embodied in the Republic of Florence. An independent city-state was threatened on all sides by more powerful rival states and the supremacy of the Medici family. . David's eyes flashed in warning, fixed on Rome.
On January 25, 1504, with the sculpture nearing completion, the Florentine authorities were forced to admit that it was impossible to lift the statue over six torans to the roof of the cathedral. They convened a committee of 30 Florentine citizens, many of whom were artists, including Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli, to determine a suitable plot for the David. Nine different locations for the statue were discussed, and the majority of members seem to be closely divided between two sites.
One group, led by Giuliano da Sangallo and supported by Leonardo and Piero di Cosimo, believed that because of the defects in the marble, the sculpture should be placed under the roof of the Loggia dei Lancei in the Piazza della Signoria; The other group thought it should be near the entrance to the Palazzo della Signoria, the city's town hall (now known as the Palazzo Vecchio). Another opinion, supported by Botticelli, was that the sculpture should have been located in or near the cathedral.
In June 1504, the David was installed next to the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio, replacing Donatello's bronze sculptures of Judith and Holofernes, embodying a comparable theme of heroic resistance. It took four days to move the statue half a mile from Michelangelo's workshop to the Piazza della Signoria. That summer the seams and tree trunk supports were plastered and the figure was given a sunken waist.
In 1873, the statue of David was removed from the piazza to protect it from damage and displayed in the Accademia Gallery in Florence, attracting many visitors. A statue was placed in the Piazza della Signoria in 1910.
In 1991, the artist Piero Cannata struck the statue with a hammer hidden under his jacket. He later said it was a model by a 16th-century Venetian painter
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