THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 12, 1994 TAG: 9410120050
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LARRY MADDRY
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
THERE MUST BE people who've visited Florence without going to see Michelangelo's David, but they probably told friends they did and have been faking it ever since.
So you have to go. Or lie about it the rest of your life. I would have been content to lie about it, but my traveling companion, Princess Liberal Right-Thinker, dictated that we would go on Thursday afternoon.
We had seen a copy of David in Piazzale Michelangelo. I thought the face was a botch - the countenance of a North Beach surfer moonlighting as a dish washer. Like seeing Dan Quayle's face atop Rodin's sculptured thinker. Besides, too much had been made of the David, it seemed. When you are told that a work is probably the finest and most sublime work fashioned by the hand of man or woman . . . when you know that it is the most recognized work of art on the planet . . . then the expectations are raised so high that disappointment seems inevitable.
A few minutes later we were slogging up a cobblestone street toward the Galleria della Accademia, the windows of shops along the way offering small, cheap plaster copies of David for sale so tacky that they only needed miniature faucet heads dripping water over him to complete the sacrilege.
I could imagine the scene around David at the Galleria. Tourists herded like sheep past a worn piece of marble whose vitality had been worn away by the centuries and only faintly glimpsed behind a shield of protective glass or plastic.
Waiting until late in the day to see Michelangelo's masterpiece proved to be a blessing. After purchasing a ticket, we entered a room filled with paintings by early Florentine masters, more madonnas with the Christ child, a smorgasbord of Christmas card art.
Surprisingly, there were only about 30 people scattered about the entire gallery. We walked out of the room containing the madonnas and entered a hushed, almost-deserted gallery for the most stunning visual impression of our lives.
There he was, on a pedestal, looking to his left. He stood at the end of an aisle - as vivid and fresh as the day Michelangelo set the chisel aside, exhausted by his perfection.
A first glance caused tiny hairs to rise on my neck. David stood
in a posture of timeless nobility without an intervening screen of glass. The initial impression was of latent power. Not so much in the marble's muscles, which were momentarily relaxed. But in the lifelike veins in an oversized hand, grasping a stone. And in the eyes of the shepherd's face. Photographs rarely catch the power of thought in the statue's eyes and knitted forehead, which, like the total work, are a miracle of contained energy.
Michelangelo rendered David to capture the moment he turned to survey Goliath. The eyes in the sculpture are those of a young man whose brain has suddenly transmitted the message ``I can take this guy.''
Bathed in a grayish green light from above, accented by tiny spotlights, the sculpture is so real that - I swear - had David stepped off the pedestal and walked around, my astonishment would have been no greater than the lingering impression that flesh had been wrested from stone.
After more than 450 years, Michelangelo's masterpiece - in capturing the eternal struggle of mortals to triumph over great odds - remains the standard against which all visual works are to be judged.
It has, after so many centuries, the astonishing ability to leave artist, critic and layman breathless. ``Incredible,'' the Princess said, daubing at tears in her eyes.
We left the gallery overwhelmed by our experience, grateful to have shared in that mercifully hushed gallery . . . nothing less than art's surpassing miracle. by CNB