david

The David's of the World Sometime soon after the year 1430, a bronze statue of David stood in the courtyard of the house of the Medici. The work was commissioned of Donatello by Cosimo d'Medici himself, the founding father of the Republic of Florence. It was the first free-standing, life sized nude since classical victorious athletes of Greece and Rome. But soft, and some how oddly unheroic. And the incongruity of the heads: of hair and …

…followed in the evolution of David. Look at them: A boy of 12, perhaps, looking down incredulously at the physical self that felled an unconquerable enemy; a boy of 14 or 15, confident and reckless, with enough adrenaline pumping to take on an army; an adolescent on the brink of adulthood, captured at the moment when, the Greeks say, sound mind and sound body are one; and another full-grown youth at the threshold of his destiny as King