1501, and finished in January, 1504, and a committee was appointed to decide upon its position, among them being Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, Filippino Lippi, Botticelli, and Andrea della Robbia, There were three suggested sites:  the Loggia de’ Lanzi; the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, where Verrocchio’s little boudoir David then stood (now in the Bargello) and where his Cupid and dolphin now are; and the place where it now stands, then occupied by Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes.  This last was finally selected, not by the committee but by the determination of Michelangelo himself, and Judith and Holofernes were moved to the Loggia de’ Lanzi to their present position.  The David was set up in May, 1504, and remained there for three hundred and sixty-nine years, suffering no harm from the weather but having an arm broken in the Medici riots in 1527.  In 1878, however, it was decided that further exposure might be injurious, and so the statue was moved here to its frigid niche and a replica in marble afterwards set up in its place.  Since this glorious figure is to be seen thrice in Florence, he may be said to have become the second symbol of the city, next the fleur-de-lis.

The Tribuna del David, as the Michelangelo salon is called, has among other originals several figures intended for that tomb of Pope Julius II (whose portrait by Raphael we have seen at the Uffizi) which was to be the eighth wonder of the world, and by which the last years of the sculptor’s life were rendered so unhappy.  The story is a miserable one.  Of the various component parts of the tomb, finished or unfinished, the best known is the Moses at S. Pietro in Vincoli at Rome, reproduced in plaster here, in the Accademia, beneath the bronze head of its author.  Various other parts are in Rome too; others here; one or two may be at the Bargello (although some authorities give these supposed Michelangelos to Vincenzo Danti); others are in the grotto of the Boboli Gardens; and the Louvre has what is in some respects the finest of the “Prisoners”.

The first statue on the right of the entrance of the Tribuna del David is a group called “Genio Vittorioso”.  Here in the old man we see rock actually turned to life; in the various “Prisoners” near we see life emerging from rock; in the David we forget the rock altogether.  One wonders how Michelangelo went to work.  Did the shape of the block of marble influence him, or did he with his mind’s eye, the Roentgen rays of genius, see the figure within it, embedded in the midst, and hew and chip until it disclosed?  On the back of the fourth statue on the left a monkish face has been incised:  probably some visitor to the studio.  After looking at these originals and casts, and remembering those other Michelangelo sculptures elsewhere in Florence—­the tombs of the Medici, the Brutus and the smaller David—­turn to the bronze head over the cast of Moses and reflect upon the author of it all:  the profoundly sorrowful eyes behind which so much power and ambition and disappointment dwelt.