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by the people of Florence — elicited from those who first saw it:
    He uncovered it, and it cannot be denied that this work has carried off the palm from all other statues, modern or ancient, Greek or Latin; and it may be said that neither the Marforio at Rome, nor the Tiber and the Nile of the Belvedere, nor the Giants of Monte Cavallo, are equal to it in any respect, with such just proportion, beauty and excellence did Michelangelo finish it . . . And, of a truth, whoever has seen this work need not trouble to see any other work executed in sculpture, either in our own or other times, by no matter what craftsman. 27
    How did Michelangelo, still only in his mid-twenties, manage to create what Vasari rightly describes as one of the wonders of the world? This is one of the greatest mysteries concerning him. He had never been apprenticed to a sculptor. In fact there is nothing to suggest that he had ever received any extensive tuition in sculpture, aside from a few lessons from Bertoldo di Giovanni, the aged custodian of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s sculpture garden. He had studied anatomy, but he was by no means alone in that — Leonardo da Vinci had studied anatomy more deeply than Michelangelo, yet he never showed anything like Michelangelo’s abilities as a sculptor. Part of the answer would seem to be that Michelangelo was born with a rare and exceptionally strong form of spatial awareness, an ability to hold a particular three-dimensional form in his mind’s eye, with total accuracy and for long periods of time. But it was also allied to an extraordinary manual dexterity, an instinctive ability to shape with his hands the images in his mind.
    David

    Vasari says that before making the David , Michelangelo made a model for it in wax. It was in the transition from that model to the finished work that he displayed his unique talents. One problem was that of scale, of translating the small image of the model into the gigantic size of the great block. The other and yet more difficult problem was to recreate an image formed by one process, but using a totally different technique. When Michelangelo made his model he was using an additive method, making a form by adding wax to wax, shaping and kneading it until he had what he wanted. When he made the David itself, he had to do the opposite. To carve is to remove, to chip away, to make a form by many acts of reduction. Most sculptors lose and find the desired form, lose and find it again, change it by a process of trial and error — all this as they go along. But for Michelangelo it seems that the form was always there for him in the marble, permanent and unchanging, as if it were simply waiting for him to reveal it. Vasari says that he carved forms from stone as if he were pulling figures from water. This haunting metaphor sounds like one of the artist’s own phrases. It may have been his attempt to describe, as best as he could, the mystery of his processes.
    To express the matter simply, Michelangelo’s brain was not the same as most people’s brains. He might be compared to certain individuals who are gifted with seemingly inexplicable mathematical skills, such as the ability to solve the square root of an enormous number in a fraction of second. Some of Michelangelo’s later architectural drawings, done at a time when he had been put in charge of the huge project of completing the new St Peter’s, show that he could effortlessly manipulate particularly complex forms, like heavily moulded architraves, drawing them from all angles without any sign of calculation or workings-out — as if he had the equivalent of a modern computer-modelling program installed in his mind.
    Certain drawings for the Sistine Chapel suggest that he made use of the same skill in creating his paintings for the vault. He would produce numerous, apparently disjointed, sketches and studies for a particular composition — an arm, a leg, a torso, modelled often from life, in widely differing