ABSTRACT
When Michelangelo returned to Florence in the spring of 1501 after an absence of almost five years, he found the city considerably changed. Savonarola, after some four years of turbulent rule, had been condemned by the Church for heresy, hanged, and then burned in the Piazza on 23 May 1498. Michelangelo, upon arriving in May of 1501, got a unique civic commission that established him once and for all as the premier Florentine artist – the giant David. The history of the David is long and complex. The block from which it was carved had been acquired in 1464 as part of an old program to furnish giant statues of Prophets for the adornment of the tribune buttresses of the Cathedral. The idea went back to the previous century, and Donatello had set to work on one such Prophet in 1410. This, the first Renaissance colossus, was described in 1412 as homo magnus et albus, the white giant.
