In the courtyard of the landmark Santa Maria del Fiore, better known as Duomo di Firenze or the Florence Cathedral, sat a twenty-ton hunk of marble sourced from the Tuscan village of Carrara. Despite its most unremarkable countenance, the rock’s provenance made it one of Italy’s most prized possessions at the time. The Alpine quarries of Tuscany were known for some of the best marbles in not only Europe but the entire known world at the time. Still are. This piece even had a name, they called it il gigante or the giant. Despite its weight and size, however, it was a challenging block to work with due to its shallow depth. Standing over fifteen feet in height and six in width, it was only three feet deep. Florence had spent a fortune on the piece because it was to be sculpted into the crowning glory of not just the cathedral but the city itself.
Construction of the imposing Gothic edifice had started even before the catastrophic Curse of Magdalene and the Black Death but got delayed for obvious reasons. Now, over a century later, the project finally neared completion. Only the dome remained. But that wouldn’t be enough. This cathedral was to be a symbol of God’s triumph over the Devil, a celebration of human faith in the face of the most punishing tests of all times, a hymn to resilience. It had to look the part. What it needed, besides the grandeur and opulence, was a centerpiece. That one piece of art in which would culminate power and influence of the entire city. That’s what this pristine white marble was envisioned to be. Unfortunately, its dimensions made it an insurmountable challenge to work with. It did not even have a good start. The sculptor who was commissioned to work on it died while still roughing out its surface. Not a good omen. Il gigante now sat in wait for deliverance. As they scouted for new sculptor, the giant sat in the yard taking rain, heat, and every element in between. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years. And then, after a whole decade, someone arrived. A glimmer of hope.
Unfortunately, the visitor looked at the giant and gave up even before he started. Back to waiting. This time, it was more than two decades. All hopes were now dead. The giant was written off as a bad investment. Decades of unchecked weathering had damaged it beyond recognition. What started off as a majestic white slab of hope and promise was now a decaying eyesore covered in moss and dirt that nobody expected anything out of anymore. What a tragic end to a promising story. But this would not be it. Some investments bear fruit only after they’re written off. Il gigante was one of them and this is its story.
The End of Darkness
Today’s Italy was once a collection of autonomous city-states, each governed independently yet nominally loyal to the Pope in Rome. Among these were Florence, Milan, Naples, Venice, Pisa, and Ravenna. These city-states acted independently, frequently forming alliances, engaging in conflicts, and rivaling each other as well as kingdoms beyond the peninsula. One such rivalry was between Florence and Rome. Those days, Rome was the administrative seat of Papal States, a sovereign collection of territories on the Apennine Peninsula directly governed by the Pope between the eighth century and the eighteenth.
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Florence and Rome shared an erratic relationship that swung between amicable and hostile depending on the circumstances. Initially supportive, the city-state sought papal favor for a variety of political and economic advantages. Under the Medici family, Florence maintained close ties with the Papacy, leveraging their financial and political influence. Conflicts, however, arose periodically over church reforms and political disputes. This was true not only of Florence but the entire continent. Europe was reconfiguring its order. The tail-end of the thirteenth century had been a particularly devastating period in its history. After a series of disasters starting with the Little Ice Age and culminating in the Black Death, the continent was now picking up its pieces. Having lost nearly two-thirds of its population in just four months of 1348, Florence had been one of the worst affected in the pestilence.
The impact of the Black Death varied across regions. In Florence, it catalyzed a dramatic shift in cultural attitudes. The unchecked orgy of death triggered a marked change in artistic expression. Where once the focus had been predominantly on spiritual themes, the city’s art began to celebrate the vitality of life with newfound intensity. It was perhaps a response to the negativity and pessimism of the times and a growing desire to celebrate life through the recovery. Florence’s art began to reflect a more vibrant, human-centered perspective, capturing the resilience and exuberance of a society that had emerged from death and desolation.
Already during the Black Death, the violent interface with mortality had driven many Florentines to a life of irreverence and carefree abandonment. Death seemed too real, too certain, and too immediate for them to bother about good and evil, virtue and sin. They just wanted to celebrate whatever little they had left of life. They married across class divides, dressed as dead aristocrats, ate like the royalty, and abandoned all propriety. This attitude persisted to an extend long after the plague was gone. A whole new way of life emerged, and it manifested in everything from art to architecture, to literature, to religion, to even administration. As the curtain drew on the “Plague Century,” this appeal to hedonism started spreading to other cities too. First the neighborhood, then all of Europe. We even have a name for this.
The Renaissance
As art became the vector of open expression and consequently, the centerpiece of royal patronage, Europe experienced an explosion of creative energy it hadn’t before. Historians call this the Italian Renaissance or simply Renaissance. One of the first structures to herald this movement was the Florence Cathedral. In fact, some could argue this is where the Renaissance was born.
While Christianity is traditionally held to have reached Florence early, with an episcopal presence as early as the third century, significant Christianization didn’t occur until the Carolignian Period half a millennium later. In 250 AD, Emperor Decius executed many Christians for refusing submission to Roman gods, including an Armenian prince named Miniato and a Palestinian girl named Reparata. Palestine, a name that would later be appropriated by Arab Muslims, was then a Roman province. Both Miniato and Reparata were later canonized as Saint Minias and Santa Reparata, respectively. Again, this is legend. Historians place the cult of Santa Reparata in Florence no earlier than the ninth century which is when she was made a patron saint of the city and venerated with a cathedral to her name.
Over time, however, Santa Reparata fell into disrepair and disuse. At any rate, the cathedral proved grossly inadequate for the growing congregation as Florence entered the second millennium. To address this, the city announced the construction of a brand-new structure to replace the old one. This would be a grand three-nave affair with a majestic octagonal dome that would later become a Renaissance staple. They even gave it a new name, Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower, flower being an allusion to the city’s name.
Although started as early as 1296, the project would take a whole century and a half to complete. That’s because the fourteenth century was not a very life-affirming period in Europe’s history. First came the Little Ice Age and the associated famines. Then came the Magdalene Floods. And then to drive the final nail, came the Black Death. Florence itself lost more than half of its population by the time the plague was gone. There was a shortage of not only workers but also patrons. The larger cathedral was no longer a pressing need. The original motivation was to accommodate a bigger crowd, something the plague had now made redundant. But the redundancy did not kill the program. If anything, the cathedral under construction was now a symbol of Florence’s triumph over the scourge and had to be completed against all odds and all reason. It would announce a new Florence to the world.
By now, the patronage of the project had gone to the city’s wool merchants’ guild or Arte della Lana, who appointed the famous Florentine painter and architect Giotto to oversee the work for them. From this point on, the work actually picked up pace and completion seemed near, but then the plague hit, and everything came to a standstill. The new cathedral was finally consecrated by Pope Eugene IV on March 25, 1436, the first day of the Florentine calendar. This was almost ninety years after the Black Death had left the city. Long before the cathedral was consecrated, the administrators had already developed ambitious plans for its final structure. But a little context before we get to those.
The Politics of Grandeur
Interestingly, Florence eschewed monarchy at a time when monarchy was the norm, and pretty much managed to keep the system at bay for over three centuries. At the time of this story, it was the Republic of Florence, not the Kingdom of Florence. And a prosperous one at that. The city’s prosperity came from its bountiful maritime enterprise that positioned it as one of Europe’s few gateways to the riches of the Orient. Florence was the among the first European city-states to strike gold coins. Trade was a big driver of this prosperity, but a bigger driver was banking. Funding voyages to faraway lands for a share in the spoils and lending money to ambitious merchants for a hefty interest were both great money spinners and fueled the rise of several banking families in cities like Florence and Venice.
These banking dynasties took turns ruling the city as elected autocrats. While the format remained republican, the praxis was as despotic as monarchy. These plutocrats would tax people at whim, exile dissidents on the slightest insecurity, and run the city like a fiefdom. For all its economic boom, there was a yawning gulf between the rich and the poor. The ruling elite enjoyed a whole other stratosphere of prosperity as compared to the destitution of the working class. It’s not that the city wasn’t cognizant of this tyranny. It was, but as is always the case, it couldn’t do anything. Until one day it could and rose in open rebellion. One such rebellion occurred thirty years after the Black Death when fed up with declining wages and rising taxes, the city’s wool workers or ciompi took up arms against the ruling elites. The Ciompi Revolt was eventually crushed but it weakened the regime significantly. It fell within four years of the uprising and the city went to the influential Albizzi Family.
The Albizzi Family was just one of several plutocratic elites that vied for power and engaged in intense palace intrigues and other machinations. The richest of them, the Rockefellers of the Middle Ages, was the House of Medici. They were and still remain the wealthiest banking dynasty to have ever been in existence. The family had invested a big part of its disposable fortune in charity and public works and had cultivated a strong relationship with the city’s otherwise most neglected working class. This didn’t go unnoticed and in 1433, the Albizzi government exiled Cosimo de’ Medici, the Medici patriarch, out of Florence. The exile, however, did not last and the very next year supporters in Florence, including members of the lesser guilds and disaffected citizens, managed to overthrow the Albizzi regime. Cosimo was recalled from exile, and upon his return, he assumed de facto control of the Florentine government. The Albizzi family was subsequently exiled, marking the end of its dominance.
The Medicis were so big, they bankrolled emperors and crusades. The family gave no fewer than four Popes to the Catholic Church. The only family that came close to matching their financial clout was the Jagat Seths of India and they wouldn’t show up until the 1700s.
Meanwhile, work on the cathedral continued unperturbed by all the political turmoil around. For all its oligarchy and oppression, the Florentine laity prized its autonomy. This was to come under threat, but more on that later. For now, the cathedral had to be completed against all odds, and it had to be the grandest it could be. Because more than just a place of worship and congregation, it was envisioned to be the city’s pride. The Medicis inaugurated their tenure in 1434. Two years later, the church was consecrated. But the Operai del Duomo or Office of Works, the body overseeing the project, wasn’t done yet.
The consecration was still twenty-seven years away when it had planned to add an extra element of grandeur to the finished product—a series of twelve figures from the Old Testament as the cathedral’s buttresses. It had to be nothing short of majestic. They were going all-out on making it the single most imposing structure in all of Europe. Remember, even the St. Peter’s Basilica of Vatican was over a century away. Some of the biggest names of the time were commissioned. Money was no object. The Renaissance, after all, was officially in session.
The Giant of Florence
The idea of twelve Biblical prophets, by some reckoning, was conceived long before the Quattrocento, long even before the Black Death. They credit it to the project’s first overseer, Giotto, who suggested the notion in one of his paintings. Giotto was coeval with arguably the most celebrated of all Florentines, Dante Alighieri, a painting of whom still graces the left aisle wall of the cathedral just before the presbytery.
The first of the prophets came out in 1410, long before the Medicis’ rise to prominence. It was an enormous terracotta Joshua by one of the pioneers of the Florentine Renaissance, Donatello. Donatello is best known for his rendition of David, the Goliath-slayer, but more on that in a bit. For now, Joshua was a promising start. The original plan for the entire statuary was marble, but a gigantic Joshua would be impractically heavy in marble, especially since it had to ultimately be lifted up to be placed on the buttress. Terracotta is far lighter and can be painted. And the prophets had to be gigantic—Joshua was three times the size of the average human—because a human-sized sculpture would struggle to attract gaze from the rooftop. Joshua’s placement was much celebrated as the first of the prophets to be successfully completed.
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Unfortunately, it would also be the last for a very long time, because a series of technical problems plagued the prophet program after Joshua, not the least of them being size and material. Even though Donatello had already completed the models for David and Hercules, translating them into larger-than-life figures proved prohibitively challenging. When the cathedral opened in the spring of 1436, only one of the twelve giants stood. The next didn’t come until nearly three decades later. Seeing not much headway in the project, already at an advanced age, Donatello left Florence seven years later to spend time in Northern Italy. Barring a brief interlude around 1453, he spent nearly two decades away from the city before finally returning in 1461. They say he was personally invited by Cosimo de’ Medici to revive the prophet program.
That’s when, on Donatello’s recommendation came another Renaissance pioneer, Agostino di Duccio. He was a Florentine as well, but at the time in Bologna on a commission. Donatello was already in his eighties by now and it was nearly impossible for him to physically work on his vision. Chiseling and carving finer details into rocks is as much a work of skill as it is of physical strength. Donatello had the skills, but he needed someone younger and stronger as his apprentice. In 1464, Agostino gave the cathedral its second figure, a terracotta rendition of Donatello’s 1415 Hercules.
Next up was David, also modeled by Donatello in the yearly years of his commission. A well-done figure of the heroic underdog would just be the crowning glory Florence was looking for. This model was Donatello’s first David but not his last. Shortly after the cathedral’s consecration, he had completed a second David, this one in bronze, likely for the Medicis. A masterpiece in its own capacity, this was the first freestanding nude male figure of the Renaissance. Therefore, so far as David goes, there didn’t exist a bigger authority than Donatello. The job naturally fell on Agostino’s shoulders. While the other two figures were in terracotta, David was planned to be in marble. It had to stand out, for it would be the mascot of Florence.
The Operai originally envisioned a monumental figure about twelve-foot tall, intending to sculpt it in four parts, much like the Romans had done in the past. But soon, and for reasons we aren’t privy to, it changed to a single piece of marble. At that time, Italy’s finest marble was sourced from the Alps of Northern Tuscany. The ambitious sculptor traveled to the Tuscan village of Carrara to personally select a block straight from the nearby Fantiscritti quarry in the Apuan Alps. The year was 1465. For all his discernment, though, the best Agostino could find in the end was a shallow slab no more than three feet in thickness. These dimensions were far from ideal for the purpose, but it was what it was. Given its size, it was nearly impossible to transport the block overland. So they took a maritime route instead, first by sea, then up the Arno River. The marble was expensive and so was its transportation.
But Agostino couldn’t work on the giant for long. Donatello died less than a year later, just as Agostino had begun roughing out the gigante. Since it was tied to Donatello, his death extinguished the commission and by extension, Agostino’s stint. In other words, Agostino’s work on the marble he had personally sourced came to an abrupt end. The barely scratched gigante now awaited a new creator. The wait ran into weeks. Then months. Then years. And then, a whole decade later in 1476, deliverance came in the shape of Antonio Rossellino. Or so it seemed.
Rossellino was off to a promising start and even drilled a large hole in an attempt to carve out David’s legs. Starting with Donatello’s bronze piece, it had become a tradition to show David standing atop Goliath’s severed head. This was Rossellino’s plan too. But the severely limiting form factor of the gigante made carving out such a head an insurmountable challenge. The shallow depth left zero room for error. Long story short, Rossellino gave up. The gigante, badly misshapen by now, went back to awaiting deliverance. This time, the wait stretched even longer. Lying exposed to the elements in the cathedral’s courtyard, the gigante began deteriorating by the day. Which was a shame because the exquisite piece of stone had cost an untold amount of money and agonizing man-hours of sweat and blood to get from the Alps to the city. But nothing could be done. It would sit like this for a quarter of a century before anyone dared to do anything about it. Unfortunately, the Medicis wouldn’t be around to witness the giant’s salvation.
Despite their connect with the Florentine working class which brought them into power, the Medicis had grown just as decadent, despotic, and disconnected with the society at large as the Albizzis were before them. Consequently, over time, the city had grown increasingly disenchanted with the family. But they could do little about it. Until a French invasion led by Charles VIII destabilized the city and ultimately expelled the Medicis as the Quattrocento drew to a close. By 1494, Florence was a de facto republic once again. This independence did not meal lasting relief though, for there still loomed constant threats of invasion and annexation by neighboring states. Meanwhile, another Florentine whiz kid had been making waves in Rome after having spent a while under the Medici wings.
The Prodigy from Rome
The kid was ten years younger than the Carrara giant that sat gathering moss and dirt in the courtyard of Florence Cathedral. He had started off as a humble line artist drawing cartoni for a famous sculptor he was training under. In fact, this is when the term cartoon came into existence. At that time, it wasn’t a simplified or exaggerated illustration of a humorous story as a standalone art form, but rather a blueprint for a planned sculpture. A rough draft, if you will. This didn’t go on for very long though.
Tired of doing cartoons and aspiring to “higher calling,” the kid decided to give up painting and take up sculpting with all seriousness at his command. Under Medici patronage, he spent months dissecting corpses just to understand the human form. His first stonework was a commission from a French Ambassador. It’s still counted among the defining masterpieces of the Renaissance.
By the Cinquecento, the gigante had become a painful eyesore—a bitter reminder of waste and failure. Desperate, the Opera del Duomo, the Vestry Board of Florence Cathedral, and the consuls of the Arte della Lana came together in the June of 1501 in a last-ditch attempt to revive sunk investment. They invited bids from anyone who could turn the eyesore into something at least moderately “presentable.” The bar was woefully low. Florence just wanted to salvage whatever it could from a very expensive investment. Requests were relayed to all the big-ticket names of the time, including Leonardo da Vinci. All declined.
And that’s when the young artist saw opportunity. He had already made a great impression in Rome with Pietà, his rendition of Virgin Mary cradling her dead son after his crucifixion. At this point, there are two versions of the story. One says he approached the guild and offered to turn the slab into a masterpiece provided he were given a free hand. The other says, that it was the guild itself that summoned him for the job. Either way, the boy was now in Florence, confronted by a colossal enterprise. True, he had a few masterpieces on his resume, but the boy was still no da Vinci. Under normal circumstances, someone as fresh as him could never have landed a commission, least of all in the epicenter of Renaissance high art. But these weren’t ideal circumstances. The guild was desperate, and expectations were low. The boy landed the commission.
On September 13, 1501, the young sculptor, fresh from Rome, began work. Before him stood what was for all intents and purposes a cursed slab of Europe’s finest marble, disfigured almost beyond repair, under the looming legacy of a titan of the Renaissance like Donatello. These were no easy shoes to fill. He built himself a makeshift enclosure in the courtyard to keep curious intruders away from what was to be his workplace for the next two-odd years. One of history’s biggest leaps of faith had just been taken.
Several radical considerations had to be made, several departures from the norm. The severed head had to go. There just wasn’t enough marble at the base. The boy thought up a whole new stance to make the most of the gigante’s restrictive form. Instead of ahead, this David would glance sideways. Instead of standing straight, this David would lean on one foot. This would be a whole new kind of David. One not seen nor imagined before. It was going to be a pre-war David, not the triumphant one, which was the norm.
Birth of an Icon
As David neared completion, after a little over two years of elbow oil and chisel magic, a new challenge presented itself—its placement. The final statue would weigh a shade over six forbidding tons. The original plan was to install it atop the dome of the cathedral, along with the rest of the prophets like Joshua and Hercules. But both Joshua and Hercules were in terracotta. This was solid marble. Raising a six-ton installation to that height was difficult, not to mention extremely dangerous. The sculptor conveyed the dilemma to the guild. When the consuls visited the courtyard to inspect the almost completed work, they must have skipped a beat in awe. Before them stood a gigantic white David that promised unparalleled majesty and irrepressible awe. This here was a Cinquecento pièce de résistance. And that’s when a second problem related to its placement emerged. Not only was it too heavy to be raised to such a great height, but it was also too exquisite to be that far removed from the public gaze. There was a staggering array of fine details that demanded closer admiration. The figure was a revolution in art, and it would be a shame to keep it so far up and away from appreciative eyes.
So the guild called a commission of some of the biggest names on the Florentine art scene to settle the dilemma. When the commission convened on January 25, 1504, the roster included names like Francesco Granacci, Cosimo Rosselli, Piero di Cosimo, Lorenzo di Credi, Filippino Lippi, Antonio da Sangallo, Andrea della Robbia, Andrea Sansovino, Francesco Monciatto, Leonardo da Vinci, and Sandro Botticelli. These were the movers and shakers of not only Florentine art but of the Renaissance itself. Numerous locations were proposed, considered, debated, and discarded in the spirited exchange that ran into hours and exposed serious internal rifts between artists, turning an artistic question into a political one.
Some favored leaving the decision to the sculptor, for he knew his work best. Others, like woodworker Francesco Monciatto, lobbied against any change in the original plan and argued that the figure belonged right where Giotto had imagined it more than 170 years ago. Rosselli and Boticelli, on the other hand, proposed mounting it on a pedestal outside the building instead. Yet another proposal was the Palazzo della Signoria, the city’s town hall that overlooks a large w-shaped square called Piazza della Signoria. This idea was advanced by the herald of the Signoria, the city’s governing body, who was also in attendance. He proposed placing it either in front of the entrance, replacing Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes, or in its courtyard, replacing Verrocchio’s bronze David. With a preference for the former. A somewhat similar proposal came from architect and sculptor Giuliano da Sangallo who suggested placing the sculpture in the Loggia della Signoria, another building same Piazza that also houses the town hall. This idea received a vote from da Vinci himself.
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Ultimately, the Palazzo prevailed. It is understood that although not part of the huddle, the sculptor himself would have favored this placement. The statue reached its final form a few months later, and at midnight on May 14, 1504, the colossal figure emerged from the courtyard, ready for its journey to the Piazza. It was so huge that they had to tear down the wall above the door so it could pass through. The statue had to be guarded round the clock as miscreants pelted it with stones in an attempt to damage it. The journey was so slow, it took four days for the giant to reach its destination. But this was the easy part. Now it had to be hoisted onto the balustrade where Judith currently stood. This took three whole weeks. But there was still work to be done. The sculptor spent the next three months adding further finishing touches to his creation, polishing out damages acquired during the transportation, and giving it a final protective coating to keep out the elements.
The statue was finally unveiled to the public on September 8, 1504, the feast day of the Virgin Mary. The orientation was kept such that David’s glance pointed in the direction of Rome. It was meant as a message to Rome: Don’t you mess with us, we’re watching you. Finally, what was meant to be the crowning glory of the cathedral, became the crowning glory of the Renaissance. The boy that saw the epitome of male beauty in an ugly piece of marble always loathed his own looks. Although the creation placed the young sculptor in the European high arts hall of fame, he wasn’t paid particularly extraordinary sum for the endeavor. Only days before the unveiling, he received the balance of what he was promised, four hundred scudi.
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, or just Michelangelo, went on to become one of the three giants of the Florentine High Renaissance, rubbing shoulders with Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. Today, there are three replicas of his David in Florence alone. And countless all over the world. Remember the block was named il gigante for its size? The epithet ultimately transferred to its final sculpted form in Florentine parlance. In doing that, David had visually transformed into the giant he slayed. The figure was less David and more an archetype of anatomical perfection, a rendition of Michelangelo’s understanding of the human anatomy. An ugly, written-off piece of marble had finally transformed the first piece of Renaissance art that transcended all typical constraints, such as precedent and tradition, that governed its peers.
Further Reading
Cohn Jr., Samuel. “Plague Violence and Abandonment from the Black Death to the Early Modern Period.” Annales de Démographie Historique, vol. n° 134, no. 2, Jan. 2018, pp. 39–61. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.3917/adh.134.0039.
Seymour, Jr., Charles. Michelangelo’s David: A Search for Identity. US, The Norton Library, 1974.
Bucci, Cristina, and Chiara Lachi. David, Five Hundred Years. Edited by Antonio Paolucci, Translated by Huw Evans, Italy, SCALA, 2006.