Marilyn Flower-Stachenfeld
Virtually Flat: response to a virtual presentation of Michelangelo’s Davide
When I met him on the street in Florence with my son, I loved him. He was the David I knew from home, Mother’s favorite hero, little David with his rock–pebble, perhaps?– and slingshot, just a kid out to kill evil. The marble reproduction I encountered on the street, though smaller than the original, kept its texture and dimensionality.
On my computer screen, he’s changed. His right hand is large, out of proportion to his figure. It is the hand of a large man. But the David who left his father’s flocks was a boy, with the hands of a boy about to become a man. The apparently balanced proportion between each aspect of David is one of the statue’s glories. Michelangelo’s deliberate presentation of an unrealistic asymmetry becomes obvious in its virtual presentation, distracting from the almost fleshly reality of the three-dimensional statue.
The David I met in three dimensions is a boy, untested as yet by any but himself. In the Old Testament text, his older brother chastises him for questioning Israel’s army about the situation they’re in: challenged to fight by the giant Philistine but terrified to take the challenge. What have I done now? David complains when scolded about speaking up. I want to see the hand of this beautiful shepherd who has saved his father’s lambs from bears and wolves, but who is still treated as a boy, not the giant hand that knocks me in the eye in a virtual presentation. If I hadn’t seen the virtual statue, I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by this detail which distracts me from the whole. Virtual presentation of a three-dimensional object cancels its depth, leaves the viewer prey to its details.
The photo cannot but be flat, no matter the angles presented. Presenting photos of the statue from all sides does not create the depth of a real figure, only gives a viewer geometrical concepts from which a living figure must be created in the viewer’s own mind.
I look at the various angles a camera offers of art from a different medium and miss the courage and heart that animate matter embodies. Stone is animate; photographs of stone are not. Emotion is best presented in its chosen medium. Using stone as he did made Michelangelo the greatest of sculptors. He didn’t coax form, emotion, and meaning from the stone to have what emerged flattened.
When I look at the famous photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phùc, her clothes ripped in agony from her body as she flees a napalm attack, I see a young girl captured in the medium intended for this record of this moment. I feel the tragedy in every photographed detail; the photographer’s brilliant use of his medium pushed me into the historical reality of her agony and his, the photographer’s, shock. The shock and the agony become ours.
When I see a virtual statue I do not see realization of intention—I do not experience the surprise and awe of such beauty embodied in a figure of great size and of its limned development in the marble; David’s strong features of head and body carved into this smoothness, his muscular grace and strength empowered by their contrast with the marble yet emphasized by it too; the lines in his face that show his concentration on his great task. In the virtual I am distracted by details: the enlarged hand, the detailed penis. I miss the awe-inspiring courage of the fleshly young David. I am not ushered by the virtual into David’s breath-taking, life-changing, historical moment.