David

David is a marble sculpture by Michelangelo, carved between 1501 and 1504, depicting the biblical figure David in the tense moment before his fight with Goliath rather than in a triumphant pose after the fact, a choice that departed from the earlier tradition of depicting David standing over Goliath's severed head. Standing over five meters tall, the statue was carved from a single block of marble that had already been partially worked and then abandoned by an earlier sculptor decades before Michelangelo, then in his mid twenties, was given the commission. Originally intended for a niche high on Florence Cathedral, the finished statue was instead placed in 1504 in the Piazza della Signoria outside the city's town hall, where its scale and confident anatomy were read by contemporaries as a symbol of the Florentine republic's own defiance of larger rival powers. The original statue was moved indoors to the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence in 1873 for conservation, with a full scale replica installed in the original outdoor location that still stands there today.