Finally Meeting David

I had been waiting most of my life for this moment, forty-seven of my sixty-five years. We were standing outside the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, waiting to see him, the one I had read about, whose picture I had first seen as a college freshman, the one put on a pedestal by his creator and whose creator I had put on a pedestal. David. The David. All seventeen magnificent alabaster feet of him. He did not disappoint.

I had gone to college from the tobacco fields of South Georgia. Scholarship put me at a university log steps better than my secondary education, at the Harvard of the South as they liked to say. A place with unlimited opportunity. Even basic freshman English class was a different world. It was just English composition, assigned to write an essay. On what? You pick. Always an artist, sketching, doodling, I went to the art books in the library and there stumbled upon Michelangelo. I had never heard of him, never heard of the Sistine chapel, knew nothing. 

With a preacher for a father, I had been severely over-churched growing up, so I knew more about the biblical David than any ten normal people. Then I discovered Michelangelo’s David and was transported. I wrote an essay about him. How Michelangelo visualized David in a block of marble at a quarry, how he directed the harvesting of the block himself, then painstakingly freed David from his stone prison. 

I found seeing David in the flesh disorienting. In the gallery, the massive scale is breathtaking. Standing back for a full appreciation proved impossible because of the crowd. Getting up close I could see the details, almost touch the marble, but could not see the whole statue. I needed a private viewing.  

Years had filled in some details and provided perspective. Maybe David wasn’t as heroic as history would have us believe. Goliath likely suffered from pituitary gigantism. A tumor deep in his brain was pressing on his optic nerves, affecting his vision, and secreting massive amounts of growth hormone, causing a metabolic myopathy. The Philistines’ apex warrior was in fact a half blind, lumbering man with muscle weakness. The nature of Goliath’s visual field deficit made it nearly impossible for him to see David. 

David’s slingshot was the ancient equivalent of a high-powered rifle. Mismatch. Advantage David. Doubters should read the account in Malcolm Gladwell’s book David and Goliath and the numerous articles in the medical literature speculating about Goliath’s medical diagnoses.

But David was still worth my lifelong wait.