David gets a Goliath spit and polish

Florence – Even David gets dusty. Every two months, Michelangelo’s masterpiece, completed in 1504, undergoes a careful cleaning at its home in Florence’s Accademia Gallery, where it has resided for over 150 years.

Considered by many awestruck viewers to represent the perfect man, the 5.1m sculpture carved from a single block of marble stands alone under the skylight of the domed gallery on Mondays, when the museum is closed.

His personal restorer, Eleonora Pucci, climbs on a scaffolding for an up-close view – part of a monitoring and cleaning ritual necessary for the preservation of the Renaissance icon visited by over two million visitors last year.

Despite David’s good looks and biblical heritage, the slayer of Goliath needs upkeep.

“A statue that doesn’t get dusted regularly, if you get close and look at it from bottom to top, you’ll see a form of lint,” the museum’s director, Cecilie Hollberg, said.

“It’s not pretty and it’s not worthy of the work of art that we preserve in this museum,” Hollberg said.

David’s bimonthly cleaning is “a form of respect, a form of dignity that we want to give to every work”.

With a furrow in his brow, a vein bulging on his neck, his weight squarely on his right foot and his sling held in his left hand, David remains focused on Goliath, oblivious to the primping going on around him.

Pucci, a petite woman wearing a white laboratory coat, hard hat, jeans and sneakers, scrambles to the top of the scaffolding where she begins taking photos to monitor David’s “state of health”, Hollberg said.

After strapping a portable vacuum onto her back, the dusting begins.

With careful sweeping motions, Pucci glides a soft synthetic brush across the David’s bent left arm, steering the particles from his forearm into the nozzle of the vacuum, which never touches the statue.

Pucci strokes David's shoulders with her brush while leaning in to examine his curly locks – where spiders leave tiny webs.

“It’s very delicate work, requiring a lot of concentration, and it needs monitoring centimetre by centimetre in order to control the state of preservation of the work – which is in great condition,” Hollberg said.

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