t empty square with its stone paving was
all wet. The great buildings rose dark. The dark, sheer front of the
Palazzo Vecchio went up like a cliff, to the battlements, and the slim
tower soared dark and hawk-like, crested, high above. And at the foot
of the cliff stood the great naked David, white and stripped in the wet,
white against the dark, warm-dark cliff of the building--and near, the
heavy naked men of Bandinelli.

The first thing he had seen, as he turned into the square, was the back
of one of these Bandinelli statues: a great naked man of marble, with a
heavy back and strong naked flanks over which the water was trickling.
And then to come immediately upon the David, so much whiter, glistening
skin-white in the wet, standing a little forward, and shrinking.

He may be ugly, too naturalistic, too big, and anything else you like.
But the David in the Piazza della Signoria, there under the dark great
palace, in the position Michelangelo chose for him, there, standing
forward stripped and exposed and eternally half-shrinking, half--wishing
to expose himself, he is the genius of Florence. The adolescent, the
white, self-conscious, physical adolescent: enormous, in keeping with
the stark, grim, enormous palace, which is dark and bare as he is white
and bare. And behind, the big, lumpy Bandinelli men are in keeping too.
They may be ugly--but they are there in their place, and they have their
own lumpy reality. And this morning in the rain, standing unbroken, with
the water trickling down their flanks and along the inner side of their
great thighs, they were real enough, representing the undaunted physical
nature of the heavier Florentines.

Aaron looked and looked at the three great naked men. David so much
white, and standing forward, self-conscious: then at the great splendid
front of the Palazzo Vecchio: and at the fountain splashing water
upon its wet, wet figures; and the distant equestrian statue; and the
stone-flagged space of the grim square. And he felt that here he was in
one of the world's living centres, here, in the Piazza della Signoria.
The sense of having arrived--of having reached a perfect centre of the
human world: this he had.

And so, satisfied, he turned round to look at the bronze Perseus which
rose just above him. Benvenuto Cellini's dark hero looked female, with
his plump hips and his waist, female and rather insignificant: graceful,
and rather vulgar. The clownish Bandinellis were someho