2024-02-29 20:43:11
Every two months, Michelangelo’s David, one of the most famous works of art in the world, undergoes a thorough cleaning. The five-meter statue from 1504, which embodies the Renaissance ideal of male beauty, has stood in the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy, for more than 150 years. Cleaning takes place on Mondays when this gallery is closed.
The AFP agency describes how David’s personal restorer Eleonora Pucci arrives in the hall. A woman dressed in jeans, a white lab coat, and a hard hat climbs onto the scaffolding behind the statue to get a close-up look at David and take a photo with a digital SLR camera.
The documentation precedes the actual cleaning of the more than 500-year-old monumental embodiment of human beauty, for which over two million visitors came to the Florentine gallery last year.
“If we don’t clean it regularly, when you look closely at the sculpture, you will see a fine layer of dust,” says gallery director Cecilie Hollberg. “It’s not only not nice, but it doesn’t meet the standards of care we give to the pieces here,” he adds, adding that David’s regular cleaning is, in a sense, “a sign of respect.” But at the same time, according to her, it is necessary. In 2014, cracks were discovered in David’s ankles, sparking debate among experts as to whether the work would one day collapse under its own weight.
The marble statue, weighing approximately six tons, depicts the biblical David just before the fight with Goliath. The man has a wrinkle on his forehead, a swollen vein on his neck, his weight transferred to his right leg, while a realistically rendered sinewy hand holds a sling from which the young biblical shepherd and future king David hurls a stone to kill the Philistine giant Goliath. In the second plan, the statue symbolizes the bravery of the new Florentine republic and its power to resist the more powerful neighboring states.
Without touch
According to AFP, the actual cleaning of David in the gallery takes place with the help of a small portable vacuum cleaner that the restorer has strapped to her back. It progresses from top to bottom, so it starts at the scaffolding to reach the top of the five-meter statue, and ends at the feet.
The restorer cleans David so that the vacuum cleaner does not touch the statue even once. | Photo: AFP / Profimedia.cz
With careful movements of the brushes, the restorer directs the dust particles to the mouth of the vacuum cleaner, which must not touch the statue even once. David’s curly hair requires special care, in the twists and turns of which small cobwebs form. “It is a very delicate work and requires total concentration. You have to examine the sculpture centimeter by centimeter,” explains the gallery director, according to whom dust would otherwise accumulate over time and take away the luster of the marble.
Just such a gray veil of dust was removed from David in 2004, when he last underwent a more thorough, roughly half-year restoration. It included the use of mineral solutions, the disposal of sulphate deposits using a scalpel or the removal of stains caused by mould. As a result, for example, the veins on David’s right hand became more visible, as did the texture of the marble itself.
However, the chosen method of restoration, which included washing the stone with special cotton cocoons soaked in distilled water, cellulose and the fibrous clay mineral sepiolite, was criticized by some experts. In protest, the chief restorer of Florence, Agnese Parronchi, resigned from her position at the time. She promoted the “dry” method, i.e. cleaning with cotton brushes, brushes and skins.
Today, air conditioning, which regulates the temperature and humidity of the air in the room, helps significantly reduce the appearance of dirt on the statue. Still, cleaning the statue every two months takes at least half a day, adds the AFP agency.
It always takes at least half a day to clean David. | Photo: AFP / Profimedia.cz
In the wind and rain
Sculpted between 1501 and 1504 from a single block of white marble and in a form reminiscent of antiquity, Michelangelo unveiled the David to great public interest at the entrance to Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio in the central Piazza della Signoria.
He completed the masterpiece at the age of 29. He conceived the figure as if it were hidden in a block of marble that the sculptor is working on. The task he set for himself meant only to remove the stone that hides the figure inside.
Michelangelo completed the David at the age of twenty-nine. | Photo: Shutterstock
David stood in the Florentine square until 1873, when it was moved to the Academy of Fine Arts. In the original place where he spent more than three centuries, a copy has been commemorating him since 1910.
During the ancient riots, the hand of the statue was insulted and broke in several places. In the new millennium, the media reported on the discovery of cracks in David’s ankles. The statue is carved from marble, which begins to crumble over time. The weight of 5.5 tons and the narrowing lower part is an excessive load for the stone. Cracks also appeared on the shaft near the right leg, on which the statue rests and which gives it the necessary stability.
According to experts, being exposed to the wind and rain in the Florentine square for three centuries damaged David. The restorers filled the cracks with plaster.
The copy standing in the Florence square is far from the only one. Other replicas of David can be found all over the world, including in Copenhagen, Marseille, Sao Paulo and Las Vegas. As the ČTK agency wrote, precisely because of the numerous copying of the statue, the Florentine gallery at one point began to demand justice. In 2017, a European-wide court there banned the use of displaying the work for commercial purposes without the consent of the home gallery. All companies that want to use a reproduction of David must pay the appropriate fee.
“But it’s very difficult to control,” admits gallery director Cecilie Hollberg. In Florence alone, there are a lot of souvenir sellers who don’t follow the rule.
Florence and Rome
Michelangelo Buonarroti lived from 1475 to 1564. He was a top Renaissance painter, architect, designer and poet, but he himself saw a more perfect art form in sculpture.
He was born in Caprese near Arezzo, but Florence soon became his family home. He received his artistic training in the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio and by studying ancient sculpture in the rich Medici collections.
“He was not satisfied with the laws of anatomy, so to speak, second-hand, from ancient sculpture. He began to research himself in the field of human anatomy, dissecting bodies and drawing according to the model, until the human figure no longer held any secrets for him,” art historian Ernst Gombrich wrote about him.
According to him, Michelangelo tried to solve the problem of the human figure with incredible purposefulness. “His powers of concentration and excellent memory were so extraordinary that soon there was no pose or movement he could not draw,” Gombrich reported.
The powerful ruler Lorenzo Magnifico soon noticed the talent of the young artist and began to support him. Today, Michelangelo is linked to Florence through many important works created both for the Medici and for the Republic and private clients. It was the statue of David that the Florentine Republic ordered directly from him.
Rome became the artist’s second important place of work. The commissions he received in the papal city include the Pieta sculpture in St. Peter’s Basilica, the reconstruction of the Vatican Temple, the transformation of Capitol Square and the tombstone of Pope Julius II. And above all, the painting decoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took him four years. Working alone on this fresco was mentally and physically extremely demanding. Michelangelo created while lying on a scaffold, paint dripping into his eyes.
The decoration of the Sistine Chapel is one of Michelangelo’s masterpieces. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
He divided the 1,000 square meter fresco covering biblical events from the beginning of the universe to the flood and Noah’s ark into nine fields, filling the area with 343 figures.
For example, a well-known scene is when God – carried and supported by angels, wrapped in a wide and majestic cloak, billowing in the wind like a ship’s sail and indicating lightness and speed – approaches Adam and pours life into his arm with an outstretched finger. “How Michelangelo was able to create the center and focal point of the painting from the touch of God’s hand and to depict the idea of omnipotence thanks to the lightness and power of this gesture of creation is one of the greatest miracles of art,” stated the art historian Gombrich in the book The Story of Art, also published in Czech.
Michelangelo, who at the same time had a complex relationship with the church and faith, presented the painting to the public in 1512.
A quarter of a century later, he returned to the Sistine Chapel to create a fresco on the altar wall with the theme of the Last Judgment, thus making an imaginary full stop after the biblical story. The work on an area of ”only” 226 square meters became a kind of Michelangelo’s reckoning with the world. Saints, angels and clusters of naked bodies float in it. The artist left here, among other things, a self-portrait – he put his face in the hands of St. Bartholomew with a pulled human skin.
The author garnered extraordinary admiration, he was recognized as one of the best masters of his time. During his lifetime, almost all artists living in Rome went to the fresco in the Sistine Chapel to copy famous figures and later use the inspiration in their own work.
Czechs have a relationship with Michelangelo thanks, among other things, to the extensive historical novel Stone and Pain by the writer Karl Schulz from 1942, which also includes an account of the creation of the David statue.
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