David

Carved from a tall, flawed block other sculptors had given up on, David stands more than five meters high, watchful and taut before the fight rather than triumphant after it - the sling looped over his shoulder, the stone cupped in one hand, the brow drawn, the great veined right hand hanging ready (1 Samuel 17). Michelangelo enlarges the head and hands and charges the whole figure with coiled tension. Set up in 1504 before the seat of Florence's government, the nude giant became the city's emblem of a free republic defying tyrants. Few works have carried civic meaning so openly, or worn antiquity so naturally.