Today was not terribly exciting but I’ve gotten complaints about my lack of blog posts so here’s a little tidbit. I visited the David again. In the Galleria dell’Academia, the David is at the end of a huge hall called a tribune that was built just to hold the David. It was moved there from the Piazza della Signoria where it had originally sat in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. There, it had endured stones being thrown at it, an uprising in the Piazza when a bench was thrown out of the window and broke its arm off and intensive rain damage. Now it’s been beautifully restored so that it is once again beautiful and a full figure but it is not at all as shiny as it once would have been. The rain washed away the polish that Michelangelo had originally finished the statue with.
There is a lot of hype about this most famous of statues so there is a fair amount of disappointment that some people feel upon seeing it in person. I, however, would join the hype and say that this statue is, in the literal sense of the word, awesome. No picture can capture the gigantic size and perfection of the body captured in marble. It is not a statue like those of Bernini in the Borghese collection; it does not come to life. This male body is too perfect to be real and he does look like he’s frozen in time but as a work of art it is striking. Maybe that is just because the statue reminds me of someone I know. But then again, it gets hype for a reason!
As we walked out of the hallway, we looked at the unfinished works of Michelangelo that line the hall. As we read the bilingual information plates, our professor (Dr. Jodie Mariotti) smiled. Why? Because she wrote all of those information plates! How lucky am I do have her as a professor? Wow!
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