Calling Michelangelo’s David iconic is something of an understatement: A monument of art history both literally and figuratively, it is undoubtedly the world’s most famous sculpture—and, with a height of nearly 14 feet and a weight of more than six tons, impossible to ignore.

Fashioned from white Carrara marble and depicting its subject completely nude, David (1501–1504) represented a high-water mark of the Florentine Renaissance, a paragon of the revival of classicism that marked Europe’s emergence out of the medieval period.