On September 8, 1504, Michelangelo's David was unveiled in Florence and installed beside the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of the republic's government. It was more than five metres tall, cut from a single block of Carrara marble, and it showed a shepherd at the moment before the fight rather than after it.
The block had been sitting in the works yard of Florence Cathedral for forty years. Agostino di Duccio had been given it in 1464. He stopped. Antonio Rossellino was commissioned in 1475. He stopped too. The marble had been cut and then left out in the weather. Part of it was spoiled. Michelangelo was 26 when the cathedral works gave it to him in 1501, and under three years later he had a figure out of a piece other people had written off.
What settled where it went was a decision the republic made deliberately. A commission that included Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo met to choose a site, and the choice of the door of the Palazzo Vecchio was a political statement as much as an aesthetic one. David was the weak party who beat the stronger one by nerve and skill, and republican Florence read him as itself: a small state facing the Medici, the papacy and foreign armies. He replaced Donatello's Judith and Herod at that spot.
The figure also broke with the tradition it came from. Donatello's and Verrocchio's bronze Davids showed a boy with Goliath's head at his feet, and the story told was the victory. Michelangelo showed a man with a sling over his shoulder, veins standing out in his hands, head turned to the left and muscles tense, deciding something. That choice, the moment of tension rather than the moment of result, is what later sculpture kept copying.
It stood outdoors until 1873, when it was moved to the Accademia Gallery to protect it from weather and from a century of stone-throwing during riots, and the left arm had already been broken in a 1527 uprising. A copy stands in the original place.