From Florence to Florida: Michelangelo's David and the Renaissance Male Body

Since its installation in 1504, Michelangelo’s David has been the frequent target of censorship and even physical attacks. Viewers have for centuries been seduced by this gorgeous body. Giorgio Vasari—for whom, as for most Renaissance Italians, male beauty was culturally intelligible in ideal legs—praised the David’s “most beautiful contours of legs and slender outlines of [his] divine flanks,” while for generations of queer men, since the emergence of modern constructions of homosexuality, the colossal David has loomed large as a gay icon. For all its ubiquity and canonical status, however, David’s nakedness has sat uneasily for an array of viewers—much like Islamic paintings of the unveiled Prophet Muhammad. By tracing the statue’s history of censorship, this paper historicizes and evaluates what viewers have seen in the David, in addition to the many ways that they have censored, concealed, and responded to the statue’s nudity. Moreover, the March 2023 forced resignation of the principal of a charter school in Tallahassee, Florida manifests current queer- and trans-phobic culture war posturing and power plays. These restrictions serve different aims than previous examples of the prurient censorship of nude Renaissance or classicizing sculpture, including recent instances of draping and cloaking statues in the United States. Rejecting facile oppositions between prudery and artistic freedom, this paper critically examines the stakes of the male body’s public display, and the weaponization of its censorship, today.