just returned to Florence from Rome with a great reputation
as a sculptor, the joint authorities of the cathedral and the Arte
della Lana offered him a huge block of marble that had been in their
possession for thirty-five years, having been worked upon clumsily by
a sculptor named Baccellino and then set aside. Michelangelo was told
that if he accepted it he must carve from it a David and have it done
in two years. He began in September, 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 i