FLORENCE, ITALY – Plans were presented in Florence on Tuesday to mark the 450th anniversaries of the death of Michelangelo and and the founding of the Accademia delle Belle Arti that houses his David sculpture.
Michelangelo Buonarroti died on February 18, 1564, at the venerable age of 89.
The year before, Cosimo I de’ Medici founded the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, known by its current title as the Accademia delle Belle Arti (Academy of Fine Arts).
David by the Italian artist Michelangelo is the masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture created between 1501 and 1504.
It is a 5.17-metre marble statue of a standing male nude.
The statue represents the Biblical hero David, a favoured subject in the art of Florence.
Originally commissioned as one of a series of statues of prophets to be positioned along the roofline of the east end of Florence Cathedral, the statue was instead placed in a public square, outside the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of civic government in Florence, where it was unveiled on 8 September 1504.
Because of the nature of the hero that it represented, it soon came to symbolize the defence of civil liberties embodied in the Florentine Republic, an independent city-state threatened on all sides by more powerful rival states and by the hegemony of the Medici family. The eyes of David, with a warning glare, were turned towards Rome.
The statue was moved to the Accademia Gallery in Florence in 1873, and later replaced at the original location by a replica.
The city will mark these anniversaries with a two-year cultural programme including exhibitions and an international conference dedicated to Michelangelo, to be held in Palazzo Vecchio.
The programme opens on January 30, 2013, at the Accademia, which will be entirely open to the public for the first time. Though not of Florentine origin, Michelangelo spent his formative years studying and working in the Tuscan city before moving to Venice, Bologna and then finally Rome.
However he returned to the city at the turn of the 16th century and created his most famous work, David, as well as several other important commissions while he was there.
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