How Michelangelo's David Became Everybody's Symbol

Michelangelo's David was commissioned for a cathedral buttress 150 feet off the ground. But it quickly became one of the most potent political symbols in all of art history.In this episode, we trace the full political life of the most famous sculpture in the Western world: from the abandoned block of marble that sat in a Florentine courtyard for thirty-five years, to the placement debate that turned a religious commission into a republican statement, to the riot that shattered its arm and the sixteen years Florence spent walking past the damage without fixing it. We look at how the Medici, the very family the David was built to oppose, ended up absorbing it, repairing it, and paying for Michelangelo's funeral. And we look at what happened after the statue moved indoors in 1882 and became available to every era that needed it: the AIDS crisis, post-9/11 New York, Banksy, Warhol and Basquiat, and a man with a hammer who said it was just too beautiful.This is a story about how political symbols get made, stolen, and remade. About who gets to write the history of a masterpiece, and what five hundred years of being everybody's symbol does to a piece of marble.