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The David is seventeen feet tall, cut from a single block of Carrara marble that had been quarried in 1464 and left abandoned — damaged, they said, by a previous sculptor who had made a poor incision near the legs. I worked around the damage.

I showed him at the moment before the battle, not after. Not the triumphant boy holding a giant head. The hand is tensed around the stone. The eyes are turned to the right — toward Goliath, already measuring the distance, calculating the angle. He is frightened and he is going to throw anyway. This is courage as it actually appears: not the absence of fear but the decision to act despite it.

The city placed him outside the Palazzo della Signoria to face Rome — to the south, toward any enemy approaching. He was a civic symbol as well as a religious one. Florence's way of saying: we are small, and we will throw anyway.