How is it that art historians could consistently have mis-measured the height of the David?
A. I don’t know how it happened, but I can hazard a guess. It’s hard to measure the David; he is very tall. I suspect that each art historian trusted the height given by an earlier art historian. Somebody long ago made a mistake, and the mistake proliferated. Even the classic 5-volume study of Michelangelo made in the 1950’s by Charles De Tolnay is wrong. The only book I have ever found that gives the correct height is the catalogue of the Gipsoteca, a little-known collection of casts of famous Italian statues. This collection, now stored in a warehouse on the outskirts of Florence, was made in the mid-1800’s when Florence was briefly the capital of a newly united Italy. By the way, that collection includes a full-size plaster cast of the David. Q.
