Even the David gets dusty. Every two months, Michelangelo’s masterpiece completed in 1504 undergoes a careful cleaning at its home in Florence’s Accademia Gallery, where it has resided for over 150 years. Considered by many awestruck viewers to represent the perfect man, the 17-foot-high (5.1 metre) sculpture carved from a single block of marble stands alone under the skylight of the domed gallery on Mondays, when the museum is closed. His personal restorer, Eleonora Pucci, climbs on a scaffolding for an up-close view — part of a monitoring and cleaning ritual necessary for the preservation of the Renaissance icon visited by over two million visitors last year.Despite David’s good looks needs upkeep. "A statue that doesn’t get dusted regularly, if you get close and look at it from bottom to top, you’ll see a form of lint,” the museum’s director, Cecilie Hollberg, told a group of journalists yesterday. "It’s not pretty and it’s not worthy of the work of art that we preserve in this museum,” Hollberg said. David’s bi-monthly cleaning, then, is "a form of respect, a form of dignity that we want to give to every work.” With a furrow in his brow, a vein bulging on his neck, his weight squarely on his right foot and his sling held in his left hand, David remains focused on Goliath, oblivious to the primping going on around him. Pucci, a petite woman wearing a white laboratory coat, white hard hat, jeans and sneakers, scrambles to the top of the scaffolding where she begins taking photos to monitor David’s "state of health”, Hollberg said.
February 19, 2024 | 11:48 PM