David

A slender boy in a laurel-trimmed hat and boots, otherwise naked, stands with one foot on the severed head of Goliath and a faint smile on his face — a victory pose that reads as sensual as it does heroic. Cast for the Medici in the 1440s, it was the first large freestanding bronze nude since classical antiquity and remains the most psychologically ambiguous David in art. Now in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, it set the terms every later David — Michelangelo's and Bernini's included — had to answer.