Michelangelo's david demonstrates the artist's ability to depict the human form.
Explanation:
Out of the hands of one of the greatest art geniuses of all time, Michelangelo's David (1502-1504) is a glorious massive marble sculpture over 4 meters high and over 5 with the base.
Commissioned in 1501, David is one of the symbols of the Renaissance and can now be admired inside the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, Italy.
Michelangelo's affinity and preference for classical sculpture is very clear in this work. The classical influence is visible in the approach of the work to the scheme of the Greek kouros. And also in the fact that the artist chooses to sculpt a muscular body in opposition, for example, to the thin bodies of Donatello's teenage figures.
Although the work expresses some movement, it is above all a sculpture that presents an "action in suspension". David's entire anatomy expresses tension, apprehension, but also boldness and defiance. The veins are dilated, the forehead is furrowed and the look is fierce yet cautious.
It is a duality that perhaps reflects the duality between body and soul that has plagued the artist all his life. For though he admired and regarded the human body as a perfect divine expression (and which he made as the chief and primary denominator of his work), Michelangelo considered it also a prison of the soul.
But it was a noble and beautiful prison, and it served as inspiration for all its creation. Take the words of Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574, painter, architect, and biographer of various Italian Renaissance artists) about Michelangelo:
"The idea of this extraordinary man was to compose everything according to the human body and its perfect proportions, the prodigious diversity of his attitudes and, moreover, the whole game of passionate movements and raptures of the soul."
