David’s Penis - Turning Tuscan: A Step-by-Step Guide to Going Native - page 128

The Emperor and his family were slaughtered, the thousand-year-old city pillaged and des-
troyed, and the populace raped, murdered and enslaved.
As if in anticipation of the worst, the delegation in 1437 had brought with them their most
sacred texts. These were consigned, not to the Pope, but to Cosimo di Medici, the de facto
ruler of Florence. Among the texts was a collection of mystical writings known as the Her-
metica. Cosimo was in the midst of having his resident philosopher, Marsilio Ficino, trans-
late the dialogues of Plato, but work on that front stopped abruptly while Ficino took on the
task of translating the Hermetica. What the Florentines believed they held in their hands
were the most ancient, most sacred, and most profound teachings about the ultimate nature
of things ever revealed to man!
Among the mystical teachings in the Hermetica there was one in particular that I believe
sheds some additional light on Donatello's second David. Portions of these texts were con-
cerned with the making of talismans and magical statues. The theory was complex and
more than we can bite off here, but the goal was to create images that could capture certain
desired qualities out of the ethers and then focus and amplify their power. If we consider
our statue in this context, we can see him as a talismanic object that embodies the shared
powers and energies of David the shepherd boy, the future King of Israel, along with the
copious gifts of Aphrodite and Hermes thrown into the mix.
God only knows what Cosimo the Elder had in mind when he asked Donatello to create
this second David. Did it further him somehow in his dynastic fantasies, or in his quest to
create the greatest city of the Renaissance? We only know for certain that it was intended
for him as a private work for ritualized contemplation in his villa. This rest is silence.
***
In the first decade of the 16 th century Michelangelo was invited to create his David out
of an enormous block of marble that had been abandoned by an earlier sculptor and had
been left lying out in the weather for twenty-five years. He was in his mid-twenties, and he
worked on the David uninterruptedly for two years.
Michelangelo's David was originally supposed to be one of a series of statues mounted on
the exterior of Florence's Cathedral. Just as with Donatello's first David, once it was com-
pleted, everyone could see that it belonged in front of Florence's City Hall. And there it
stood for more than 300 years. Its physical placement confirmed its place in the tradition
of Davidic statues that embody and represent Florence, that proclaim its greatness.