Galleria dell'Accademia a Firenze

Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence

In 1784, the Accademia Gallery was the Grand Duke Peter Leopold to make known the great examples of Florentine art students at the nearby Academy of Fine Arts.
Also called the Museum of Michelangelo, due to the abundance of the works of the Florentine genius, the Galleria dell'Accademia currently holds the sculptures of other artists and paintings from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. The most important work of the Gallery is undoubtedly Michelangelo's David that was first exposed to the wind and cold of Piazza della Signoria, now replaced by a copy. The statue depicts the biblical hero when he is about to face the giant Goliath and symbolizes the victory of wisdom and courage against the sheer brute force. Michelangelo worked on David from 1502 to 1504 using a block of marble that had been previously used by Agostino di Duccio and Antonio Rossellino. Both artists abandoned the sculpture because it judged the marble too fragile to support the weight of a statue of 4 meters and 10. Michelangelo obviated the fragility with special interventions making David a symbol of formal perfection and eternal beauty that emerges despite the coldness of marble.