David
Meir Soloveitchik
Mosaic Magazine, Dec. 20, 2018
“… for Rembrandt as for other 17th-century Dutch painters, the aim was to capture not the majesty of the gods but the nature of living, breathing humanity in all of its simultaneous magnificence and lowliness.”
Perhaps the most famous sculpture in the world is Michelangelo’s heroic statue of the biblical David (1504). Standing over fourteen feet tall in the Galleria dell’Accademia in the center of Florence, it is surrounded perpetually by hordes of enraptured art lovers and tourists. The nude, Adonis-like youth stands before them, muscled, vigilant, poised, calmly holding a sling over his left shoulder while loosely clenched in his right hand rests the deadly stone that in an instant will be launched at the giant Goliath.
It is a very great masterpiece. Yet this universally admired depiction of one of history’s most famous Jews is not the least bit Jewish.
Michelangelo’s ambition, as Simon Schama has written, “was to approximate men to gods.” Inspired primarily by antiquity, as were other Renaissance artists, he translated mortal humanity into something purer, chillier, more enduring, and in his sculptures undertook (again in Schama’s words) to “tease out from the marble those ideal forms he believed lay trapped within it.” And so it is with his David, whose “heroic power . . . lies precisely in [the statue’s] inhumanly frozen immobility.”
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