Michelangelo's David was carved from a block others gave up on

The marble for the David had been started, set aside and left lying for years before Michelangelo took it on at 26. It was meant for somewhere it never went.

The David in Florence is so familiar that it is easy to forget it began as a rescue. The marble it came from had already been started by one sculptor, handed to another, and then left lying for about twenty-five years before Michelangelo took it on.

The project belonged to the Operai del Duomo, the board in charge of Florence Cathedral. They planned twelve large statues of Old Testament prophets for spurs on the cathedral's buttresses, high along its roofline. In 1464 they hired Agostino di Duccio to carve a David, and in 1465 he obtained a large block of marble from Carrara. He began to shape the torso, legs and feet, and then the work stopped in 1466, the year his master Donatello died.

In 1476 Antonio Rossellino was commissioned to carry on, but the contract seems to have been cancelled. An inventory in 1500 still described the block as badly blocked out and lying on its back.

On 16 August 1501 the board signed a contract with Michelangelo, who was 26. He began carving on 13 September 1501, working with a block that someone else had already started to shape, and finished in 1504.

A statue that never went up

With the statue nearly done, Florence had to decide where to put it. On 25 January 1504 a committee of 30 Florentine citizens, Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli among them, met to choose. The statue went to the entrance of the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of the city's government, and was unveiled there on 8 September 1504.

The first plan may still show in the stone. The head and hands are unusually large, especially the right hand, which is not typical of Michelangelo or of the ancient sculpture he knew. One suggested explanation is that he enlarged them for a statue meant to be seen from far below, on the cathedral, where the key features had to read from a distance.

The David stood in the open square for more than three and a half centuries. In 1873 it was moved indoors to the Galleria dell'Accademia, where it still stands, and in 1910 a copy took its place outside the palace.