Who Owns Michelangelo’s ‘David’?

Max Rossi/Reuters - Visitors to the Accademia Gallery in Florence stop to get a closer look at Michelangelo’s “David”.

Does Italy, or Florence own the statue?

Upper Broadway's buried treasures

Standing on what was once the estate of the bird painter John James Audubon, known today as Audubon Terrace, at Broadway and 155th Street, is an assemblage of elegant Beaux-Arts structures built during the first three decades of the 20th century. Some of the original tenants—including the American Indian-Heye Foundation, the American Geographical Society and the American Numismatic Society—have moved out, but fortunately the Hispanic Society of America remains firmly planted.
In fact, it is taking over some of the vacated spaces. Now that the Hispanic Society has completed the first phase, at a cost of about $5.5 million, of its continuing renovation under the direction of architect Maria C. Romañach and with the aid of Spain's Ministry of Culture, New Yorkers no longer have any excuse to disregard its jaw-dropping collections.

One of our walking tours a few years back covered exactly this area; I remember Trinity cemetery across 155th Street. We walked around the area.

Upon entering the Society's elegant courtyard, the first work one encounters is the magnificent and commanding portrait by Francisco Goya of "The Duchess of Alba" (1797). Several other Goyas are on the balcony above, which serves as a venue for a quick survey in Spanish painting from the late Renaissance to the late 19th century.

 I don't think of a Goya anywhere outside a museum.

 The Hispanic Society of America
Joaquín Sorolla's 'Ayamonte'

 The Hispanic Society of America
Diego Velázquez's 'Portrait of a Little Girl'

For most New Yorkers today, the name Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) means the gilded bronze equestrian monument to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street: Victory, crowned with laurel and clutching a palm frond, strides ahead of the bearded general, with his fierce gaze and windblown cape, erect on his snorting horse. A century ago, Saint-Gaudens would have also been widely known for his Diana—a tall, athletic nude, stepping forward as she releases an arrow from her bow—a landmark sculpture that once dominated the New York skyline from the tower of the original Madison Square Garden. (Removed when the building was razed in 1925, Diana is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) In 1908, not long after the sculptor's death, the Metropolitan Museum installed a memorial exhibition of 154 of Saint-Gaudens's works in the Great Hall—what was then the Sculpture Court. Now we can broaden our acquaintance with the artist at the far more modest "Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," a finely tuned exhibition, on view through Nov. 15, that showcases the Met's considerable holdings of the sculptor's works and provides a context for his celebrated monuments. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bronze cast of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, 1910. That the Sherman Monument largely defines Saint-Gaudens for many of us is entirely appropriate. The sculpture exemplifies his distinctive refined, vigorous style, a synthesis of acutely observed naturalism and classical idealism, informed by the legacy of the Renaissance. The Sherman Monument shares the assured forms and the tense equilibrium between powerful warhorse and powerful rider first announced by those quintessential mounted warriors of the Renaissance, Donatello's Gattamelata, in Padua, and Verrocchio's Colleoni, in Venice. There are even echoes of the iconic Roman bronze that inspired both Donatello and Verrocchio, the equestrian portrait of Marcus Aurelius, once the centerpiece of the Campidoglio, in Rome.


Verrocchio's Colleoni



















Donatello's Gattamelata