Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), barely twenty-six and freshly returned from Rome where he had just completed the Pietà, was called back to Florence in 1501. The commission was a rescue mission: a vast marble block, abandoned for forty years after earlier sculptors had begun and ruined it. Agostino di Duccio and Antonio Rossellino had already roughed it out, which is partly why Michelangelo's figure has narrow hips and a comparatively slender profile — he had to work inside a constrained volume.

David is an Old Testament hero, not a classical one — depicted in the moment before his confrontation with Goliath, sling over his shoulder, stone in his right hand, eyes locked on a point somewhere on the horizon. The subject was familiar to Florence: Donatello had cast a bronze David in the 1440s and Verrocchio another in the 1470s. Michelangelo's break with them lies in scale and moment. Earlier Davids showed the aftermath of victory, with Goliath's severed head; Michelangelo chose the instant before — tension, force unspent. This is a marked departure from the classical 'moment of action'.

The anatomy is visibly 'incorrect': the right hand is disproportionately large, the head oversized relative to the torso, the body taperingly narrow toward the top. These distortions are deliberate. The statue was originally intended for an exterior niche on Florence Cathedral, to be viewed from below. After completion, a committee of thirty artists and humanists changed those plans, installing David in front of the Palazzo Vecchio as the symbolic heart of the republic.

In 1873 the statue was moved indoors to the Galleria dell'Accademia to protect it from weather and erosion; the figure in front of the Palazzo Vecchio today is a copy. A hammer attack on the left leg in 1991, and ongoing micro-crack monitoring, are reminders of the statue's vulnerability.