New York Times Magazine:
A team of Italian geoscientists published a paper called “Modeling the Failure Mechanisms of Michelangelo’s David Through Small-Scale Centrifuge Experiments.” That dry title concealed a terrifying story. The paper describes an experiment designed to measure, in a novel way, the weakness in the David’s ankles: by creating a small army of tiny David replicas and spinning them in a centrifuge, at various angles, to simulate different levels of real-world stress. What the researchers found was grim. If the David were to be tilted 15 degrees, his ankles would fail.
The seed of the problem is a tiny imperfection in the statue’s design.
The opening photo of this long article is fantastic. I saw David many years ago in Florence and was absolutely captivated by the statue.
Researcher: “You know, Michaelangelo, if you tilt your statue 15 degrees, it will break?”
Michaelangelo: “Why the hell would you tilt it?”
The real problem: his hands are way too big.
There are probably several jokes about larger-than-life rock-hard naked men, bad ankles notwithstanding.
I’m not going to make any of them.