``And the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell upon his face to the earth.''
And that was the end of Goliath, according to Samuel.
But it certainly was not the end of David, not in the superheated minds and skills of Renaissance and Baroque artists in Italy.
You run across this innocent shepherd lad who would be king everywhere in the museums, the churches. And why not?
David represents what you can do with God's help. Brute strength can be overcome with cunning. Anything is possible if you just try. It's a self-help story from the greatest self-help book.
The traveler to Italy who wants to track our rock star must start, of course, in Florence.
In the Galleria dell'Accademia looms the David most familiar to us. Hard to believe this was a leftover piece of Carrara marble others had chipped on. From Michelangelo's drills and chisels came the almost perfect human form. The head and hands are too large, of course, but it was supposed to be placed high in the cathedral.
Michelangelo was only 26 when he finished it in 1504. And remember, he'd already done the Pieta down at St. Peter's in Rome. Also out of proportion, but similarly stunning.
This David does not look like a youth who was taking sandwiches and a wineskin to his brothers on the battlefield. He looks like somebody who forgot his armor under the walls of Troy.
Here is the Renaissance ideal captured, the return to the classical Roman or Greek art.
Which is why I always viewed this David as a bit passive. This is a kid facing a 10-foot-tall Philistine who's chatting about feeding his body parts to the birds.
The guide instructed us to look closely at the face, and there it is, steely resolve, perhaps cold calculation about just where on the brow to stick that stone. This David, standing at more than 14 feet, could take Goliath at arm wrestling.
The statue was immediately embraced by the Florentines, who placed it in the great Piazza della Signoria as a symbol of their power and freedom. (A copy is there today.)
And there it stayed until the 1880s, when David went indoors out of the chill.
Like most hot spots in Italy, make days-ahead reservations to enter the Accademia (your hotel can help you). You'll bypass hundreds of people standing in line. Online: www.polomuseale.firenze.it/english/musei/academia.
The next David isn't that far away, in the Bargello.
This one, by Donatello, predates the more famous version by perhaps 60 years. Considered the first life-sized, free-standing nude after Roman times, it may even have inspired Michelangelo.
Beautiful, but to me, not as likable. He's certainly more realistic as a mere youth, too small to don King Saul's proffered armor, hardly sporting the abs of the guy a few blocks away. And where did he get the hat? This guy killed lions and bears up in the hills?
Described as androgynous or effeminate by some art critics, he seems to be smirking with his booted foot on the giant's head. In the Bible, David did not seem a smirker. He also did not seem to be a guy who would go to battle in just boots and a bonnet. Maybe that's just me.
The frailty was meant to show you can whip a Goliath with the help of God, without big muscles, which was the point of the story, of course.
This once-shocking statue originally belonged to Cosimo de' Medici, of the powerful Florence clan.
A much earlier (1408) marble David by Donatello also is here. Gothic and cloaked, it shows how the artist would later grow.
The Bargello boasts of another masterpiece David, a bronze done between 1465 and 1475 by Andrea del Verrocchio, teacher of Leonardo da Vinci.
This one is pretty straightforward, with clothes, quietly enjoying his victory. The 4-foot statue also features Goliath's detached head. Even today there is some debate as to where the head should be located: between his feet or to the right under the sword?
This was another Medici family commission. After a year, it was sold and went on public display before the Palazzo Vecchio, in the same square where Michelangelo's David later ended up.
The National Museum of the Bargello, housed in an old prison, also holds pieces by Michelangelo and other greats. Online: www.polomuseale.firenze.it/english/musei/bargello
David, of course, shows up in or on hundreds of churches across Italy. But with limited space, we have to move on to Rome and the Galleria Borghese.
My favorite David is Bernini's. This guy should be in an action movie, which is the trademark of Baroque -- drama captured in a moment.
The earlier ones spoke of the moments right before or after the fight.
Bernini the younger shows the shepherd looking over his shoulder at his target just before he uncoils and flings his killer stone.
White marble, life-sized, it was completed in 1624 after seven months. (Bernini was the opposite of Leonardo. Give him a commission, and bam! UPS is dropping off your ''Rape of (Fill in the blank)'' -- at the back door. This piece was done while he worked on Apollo and Daphne, another monumental work at the Borghese.)
At his feet are his cast-off harp and Saul's armor. If you think the Accademia's David has a game-face, this grimace tells you he really wants to kill someone.
That face, by the way, is said to be Bernini's at 24, when the relentless art collector Cardinal Scipione Borghese commissioned this statue.
Anyone who fights his way through the Borghese's basement ticketing-audiophone-cloakroom-giftshop madhouse deserves another David, this one as melancholy as Bernini's is lively.
Yes, it's a Caravaggio, a wonderfully gloomy oil that could be his last, done perhaps just before his death at 38 in 1610. (Caravaggio was a brawler, who looked for trouble and found it. This piece may have been done as an attempt to wheedle his way safely back to Rome, from which he had fled after killing a man.)
Often there's a brilliant color to offset the deep shadows of his work. Not this time. The only light bounces softly from David's torso, his face and the face of the giant. The hair of both disappears into the edges.
The painting is so dark you have to conclude the artist thought the duel took place in a cave. But again, David's a convincing youth, who could have just come from guarding a flock in Tuscany.
Caravaggio did an earlier David With the Head of Goliath (in Madrid today). There's the same gruesome head, seriously dented, lying on the ground. In that one, the youngest of all Davids (maybe a seventh-grader) bends over with a cord to do what? String up the head like a model plane from his bedroom ceiling?
But in this later oil in Rome, some see disgust in David's features as he contemplates the vanquished Philistine. And everyone sees Caravaggio's own features in Goliath's.
So was he trying to transmit self-loathing because of the fix he had put himself in? (Painters often feel sorry for themselves in their paintings: Remember Michelangelo's writhing rendering of the Last Judgment for the Sistine Chapel? His own anguished face supposedly is found on the empty skin of the famously flayed St. Bartholomew.)
What we know is this: The painting was in Borghese's hands as early as 1613. And Borghese, as the nephew of Pope Paul V, held the power to grant or withhold pardons as well to control papal fees and taxes, which is how he amassed his fortune and art collection.
The magnificent Borghese treasure house is the most limited venue of this tale, so you must call and make reservations well in advance. Your group will go in and out on scheduled times, which means one mob is leaving as a new mob comes in. Be prepared to dump your cameras and purses at the cloak room. Another line floods the claustrophobic gift shop to pick up the gear. Online: www.galleriaborghese.it.
Ah, the popes. The Vatican is a perfect place to visit the last David on our tour.
Look up into a corner of the famous Sistine ceiling and find Michelangelo's other David. This is an action shot, too. Better shield the eyes of the kiddies. In this story, Goliath is clearly not dead yet, perhaps just stunned.
The young hero, clothed this time, is astride the monster as he tries to rise from an eight-count. David grabs the gray head (Goliath was old in this version? Perhaps a thesis on early generational conflicts?) and his blade is about to slice down. Schiiick!
Painted between 1508 and 1512 at the insistence of Pope Julius II, the huge fresco is amazing, in part because Michelangelo was really not all that experienced with the medium. The pope had faith.
The number of beautifully painted figures (around 300) crowding the ceiling is said to have stunned Raphael, working next door.
Kind of like a rock to the forehead.
To visit the Sistine, you must go through the Vatican Museum, which includes four miles of art. A tour is more costly but avoids most of the waiting with the mob outside.
