Jimmy Meets The David

Me Knows Better Than to Say This… but I will.  I am praying that my daughter is not blessed with my unique and somewhat bizarre sense of humor, but on somewhat more frequent occasions it seems to be surfacing.  Take for example our trip to Italy last year.  The history is amazing but after a while it’s difficult to absorb another marble statue representing some aspect of some century so far back I’ve lost count.  Even though the art is amazing, soon all the sculptures begin to look alike… including all aspects of the detailed anatomical features.  As a modest Midwestern father of a teenage girl, I finally got somewhat accustomed to the… let’s just say the unashamed aspects of the artwork.

We had been through the Vatican, St. Peter’s Cathedral and every Roman fountain known to man.  It wasn’t until we reach Florence, home of Michelangelo, that we seemed to have reached the peak… the agony of seeing one more statue (showing everything), but the ecstasy of seeing one the greatest sculptures ever crafted.  Florence proudly displays “The David.”  This is the masterpiece crafted from a chunk of marble rejected by many renowned artisans of the day, only to be accepted by, at the time, a little known Michelangelo as a challenge to showcase his own confident abilities.

The guide was telling us that we were looking at an exact replica and if we were so interested, she could take us to see the original that is protected in a museum a couple of blocks around the corner.  However, it was easier to see this one in the large public square amongst many other works of art and she explained the story behind masterpiece.  She noted that even though this represented the young David at the moment prior to slaying Goliath, that the model was most certainly an Italian man.  She noted that the nose was more Roman and that this was not a young boy, but rather a young and a well developed young man at that.  She also pointed out that David, while Jewish, would have been circumcised, but that this model was definitely not. 

It was then that guide gracefully waved her hand to show all the other similarly displayed young Italian physiques forever captured in the proud and stoic marble and commented, “As a result, you’ll begin to note some similarities to the other sculptures done around the same time.”

In an instant, my daughter leaned over to my wife, rolled her eyes and dryly said out of the corner of her mouth, “I’ll say.”