Michelangelo did what he wanted to. He made the Virgin of the Pietà a girl fifteen; he sculpted figures for the Medici tomb that didn’t at all resemble the Medici buried there (“in a few years no one will care what those two men really looked like”); and he carved a Biblical David as big as Goliath—and nearly as threatening. And wasn’t David in the Bible story just a boy?

Here is a David made by Leonardo da Vinci’s first teacher, Verrocchio.

Michelangelo’s young athlete is about to join combat; Verrocchio’s little scamp stands over Goliath’s head with a boyish swagger and the start of a grin.

..