This grim stone block with the battlements and the square tower has one of the darkest résumés in the city — a barracks, a courthouse, and a prison, with Florence's executions carried out in the little courtyard inside. Today it holds the greatest collection of sculpture in Italy. And standing in it, indoors, safe at last, is the naked bronze boy from the Medici courtyard.
Donatello's David. Remember him from the first palace. This is where he ended up.
He does not look like much of a threat, which is exactly the point of him. And he is one of the most radical objects ever made — the first free-standing nude statue cast since ancient Rome. A thousand years. For a thousand years nobody in Europe had dared make a life-sized naked figure to stand alone in the round, and then a Florentine sculptor did it, in bronze, which is expensive and permanent and impossible to walk back.
Look at how he's made. David wears nothing but a laurel-wreathed shepherd's hat and a pair of soft boots, which
somehow leaves him more exposed than if he wore nothing at all. His weight is cocked onto one hip, a small private smile on his lips, one bare foot resting on the severed head of Goliath. And down by that head is a detail people have been raising their eyebrows at for five hundred years — a feathered wing from the giant's helmet runs all the way up the inside of David's thigh. Soft, sensual, stra
