Michelangelo's David: Florentine History and Civic Identity

Description

This book takes a new look at the interpretations of, and the historical information surrounding, Michelangelo's David. New documentary materials discovered by Rolf Bagemihl add to the early history of the stone block that became the David and provide an identity for the painted terracotta colossus that stood on the cathedral buttresses for which Michelangelo's statue was to be a companion. The David, with its placement at the Palazzo della Signoria, was deeply implicated in the civic history of Florence, where public nakedness played a ritual role in the military and in the political lives of its people. This book, then, places the David not only within the artistic history of Florence and its monuments but also within the popular culture of the period as well.

John T. Paoletti is Professor of the History of Art, Emeritus, and the William R. Kenan Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, at Wesleyan University. He taught the history of Italian Renaissance art and of the art of the twentieth century from 1972 to 2009. He received Wesleyan's Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching and the College Art Association's Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. He has been a Fellow at the School of Historical Studies, the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, and a visiting professor at the Villa I Tatti. From 1996 to 2000, he was the editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin. He is co-author, with Gary Radke, of Art in Renaissance Italy, now in its fourth edition. He is co-editor, with Roger Crum, of Renaissance Florence: A Social History (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

'Michelangelo's David is a valuable link in an ongoing chain of Michelangelo studies, and a detailed study of the extended history and ambiguity of the statue's historical, civic, political, and Christian connotations ...' Joost Joustra, Oxford Art Journal