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Help with Art history!?

Please help with this essay questions! Any ideas? Why is Michelangelo's David significant to art hostorians?


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

For one thing, the story of how David came to be is quite interesting. There was an old marble column lying in an alley for about 100 years and they held a contest to determine what artist would get to carve it. The stone was rotting out on one side, so that part was unusable. Michelangelo won the contest, and sculpted David. David's body is leaning in a strange way because Michelangelo had to design David around the crumbling, rotten place in the marble.

It's interesting that sculptors were not respected as artist's back in Michelangelo's time, perhaps because of the intense labor involved and that it is dirty work. Painters were considered true artists. Michelangelo was paid only 600 Florens to sculpt David; at the same time a painter was paid 3000 Florens to paint a painting. It was discovered later that the canvas for that painting was improperly prepared and the paint literally slid off of it.

Madderthanthehatter is wrong. Michelangelo invented muscles in his sculptures to suit his artistic tastes.