Who sculpted David?

Michelangelo, between 1501 and 1504, from a block of marble that two previous sculptors had started and abandoned decades earlier - it was known around Florence as the Giant, had been lying in a cathedral workyard for years, and was thought to be flawed and too narrow to use. He was 26 and did it anyway, which is part of the point of the statue.

He chose the moment before rather than after. Every earlier David - Donatello's, Verrocchio's - shows the victory, with Goliath's head at his feet. Michelangelo's is standing with the sling over his shoulder and a stone in his hand, deciding, with the tension in the neck and the oversized right hand doing all the work. It was placed outside the Palazzo Vecchio facing Rome, and a Florentine republic that had just expelled the Medici did not need the symbolism explained.

The proportions look wrong close up and right from below, because they were designed to be seen from below - the head and hands are enlarged, and the statue was originally intended for a roofline position on the cathedral. It stood outdoors for over 350 years, taking weather and, in one riot, a bench thrown from a window that broke its arm, before being moved indoors in 1873. Analysis in the 2000s found microfractures in the ankles from decades of standing slightly off vertical.