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The story behind David is fascinating:

It was not only Agostino di Duccio who was overmatched the quarriers were, too. The block was 18 feet tall and something like 25,000 pounds. No one had harvested a stone this large in close to 1,000 years. The whole process was one ordeal after another. Because statuary marble tends to form up near the tops of mountains, it took months of labor to get it down to the quarry floor. The trip from Carrara to Florence an 80-mile journey that takes around two hours in a modern car took two more arduous years. There were teams of men, teams of oxen, big ocean ships, flat river barges, inclement weather, monthslong delays. At one point, the giant block fell into a muddy ditch and had to be laboriously extracted. One scholar has speculated that this accident caused the cracks that now plague the ankles.

When the block finally arrived in Florence, it was greeted as a wonder. Its size, to the public, would have been more apparent than its imperfections. It was deposited in a courtyard behind the cathedral a huge white apparition in the middle of the small brown city. People came from all over just to stare.

In the year 1501, amid fresh political spasms, the leaders of Florence decided to rehabilitate the Giant. But who could possibly save it? There was some talk of giving the project to Leonardo da Vinci, the citys (and Europes) reigning genius. But Leonardo was an intellectual, nearly 50 years old, who openly disdained the process of sculpture that sweaty blunt hacking at stone. In the end, the commission went to a less famous Florentine, Michelangelo Buonarroti, a 26-year-old eccentric who had just made his reputation in Rome by carving a marble Piet for St. Peters a statue of astonishing grace and maturity and polish. Michelangelo hurried home to take the commission.
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