Michelangelo's David Not So Perfect After All

LONDON, June 7 (Reuters) - Michelangelo's David, the towering sculpture acclaimed for its depiction of male beauty, is not so perfect after all. He squints. Laser images of David's face taken by computer scientist Marc Levoy of Stanford University in California show he is not looking out into the distance but is squinting.

"The gaze directions of his eyes actually diverge," Levoy told New Scientist magazine Wednesday.

In one view the statue is looking slightly to the left but from the left profile he appears to be staring straight ahead.

"It's a typical Michelangelo trick. He optimized each eye for its appearance as seen from the side," Levoy added.

The flaw in the 17-foot statue is not visible to the admiring public in its current home on a 6-foot pedestal in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. Even if it were, the frontal view is usually hidden by the statue's upraised hand.

Levoy, who spent a sabbatical making computerized images of Italian sculpture, took the images by hoisting a scanner and pointing it directly at David's face. He recorded the shape of the beam as it swept across the surface of the statue.

Marc Levoy responds

The article by Reuters (above) contains several errors. First, David isn't squinting. If anything he's slightly walleyed. Second, I never characterized this as a flaw in the statue. I'm sure Michelangelo knew exactly what he was doing. The title of the Reuters article is very misleading on this point. Third, I never said, "It's a typical Michelangelo trick." I said, "It would be a typical Michelangelo trick," meaning that Michelangelo used similar design tricks elsewhere. I am a computer scientist, not an art historian, so my observations about the design of his statues are at best educated guesses.

In fairness to Reuters, it should be pointed out that many of these errors arose from their (unverified) use of information contained in an article published in New Scientist on June 10. (Click here for a cached copy of this article.) That article contains a number of other errors that, fortunately, Reuters did not reproduce. For example, it says that "Levoy claims his examination technique is so detailed it reveals the tiny natural cracks in the marble..." I have never made such a claim. Our laser scanner has a spatial resolution of 0.29mm. This is not nearly fine enough to pick up what most people would consider a "tiny crack" on a marble statue.

Setting aside these caveats, it is indeed widely accepted that Michelangelo introduced distortions into his statues in order to achieve certain visual effects. In the David, his head and right hand are too large for his body. Also, his famous furrowed brow actually protrudes from his forehead in a way that is anatomically impossible. In the Pieta in in St. Peter's Basilica, if the Virgin were to stand up, you would see that she is mostly legs. Also, her right arm, which supports her son's shoulders, is too long. These are some of the tricks Michelangelo used in order to gracefully depict a grown man lying in a woman's lap. (Although we didn't scan this statue, there are photographs, some taken during the statue's 1964-5 trip to the New York World's Fair, that show its sides and back. From that vantagepoint, the distortions are obvious.)

In the particular case of the gaze directions of David's eyes, I first noticed their divergence while studying the statue from atop a scaffolding. I shot the picture shown above to document my observation. Later on, by studying our 3D computer model of the statue from various viewpoints, I came up with a possible explanation for the divergence based on the strikingly different profiles of David's head as seen from the two sides of the statue. My explanation, and some computer renderings to support it, can be found here.

By the way, the image (above) is not a laser scan; it is a simple photograph. I shot it at the same time our scanner was digitizing the statue. You can see our laser beam working its way through David's hair on the left edge of the photo.