Galleria dell'Accademia (David)

Michelangelo's 'David,' carved between 1501 and 1504 when the artist was in his mid-twenties, stands 5.17 metres tall and weighs over 6 tonnes. Remarkably, he shaped it from a flawed block of Carrara marble that two earlier sculptors had abandoned decades before as unworkable. The finished colossus—depicting the biblical hero tense in the moment before battle—became a symbol of the Florentine Republic's defiance of larger rivals. It stood outside the Palazzo Vecchio from 1504 until 1873, when it was moved indoors to protect it from weather and, once, a vandal's hammer in 1991. Today it draws over a million visitors a year to the Accademia, alongside Michelangelo's unfinished 'Prisoners.'