Hmmmm, it certainly was amazing gazing up at Michelangelo's statue of David. Our guide gave us all the details (which you can read for yourself at Wikipedia) but his explanation about why David is uncircumcised just caused more questions for me. I'm not obsessing - really!! But, was Mr. Simoni anti-semitic? Or, did the church "encourage" him to make the statue more Christian and less Jewish? Wikipedia says that it would have been common during the Renaissance to depict David as uncircumcised. Our guide said it was because Michelangelo wanted to depict David as representing the men of Florence and encourage them to "overcome the tyrrany of the Medici family as David overcame Goliath." But, according to Wikipedia, he worked for the Medici's, left Florence when the balance of power swung towards another family, and returned when the Medici's regained control.
Just a thought, anybody have any ideas?? I was going to include a closeup of the area under discussion, but decided you can zoom in on your own :)
5 comments:
Did you notice how huge David's hand looks in relation to his body. I didn't really notice the uncircumcised part while I was there, but I was fascinated by what appears to be an oddly large hand from many angles.
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