In 1501, a 26-year-old Michelangelo signed on to salvage a 17-foot block of Carrara marble that had sat abandoned in a Florence cathedral courtyard for roughly 25 years. Two sculptors, Agostino di Duccio and Antonio Rossellino, had already tried and quit, and the stone was infamously nicknamed the Giant. For six florins a month and a two-year deadline, he set out to prove he alone could free the figure he believed was already inside.

This episode follows the creation of the David from the first chisel strike through its politically charged installation at the doors of the Palazzo della Signoria, then traces five centuries of damage and survival, from a riot-shattered arm to an acid wash, a hammer attack, and the slow forward tilt that conservators monitor today.

• Why Michelangelo forged his own tools and worked entirely with pointed tools, toothed chisels, and a bow drill, and how modern analysis of tool marks confirms it
• The radical decision to depict David before the fight, without Goliath’s head, and how the oversized head and hands were engineered for viewing from the cathedral roofline
• How the narrow, ruined block dictated the statue’s famously slender profile and its classical contrapposto stance
• The 30-person committee including Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli, and the four-day, 40-man move on 14 greased logs while rivals pelted the statue with stones
• The 1527 riot that snapped the left arm, the 1843 hydrochloric acid cleaning, the 1991 hammer attack, and the structural stress on the ankles today