a reflection from my recent pilgrimage to Rome
Art historians and tour guides are always talking about how Michelangelo’s David is a symbol of the Renaissance belief in the power of the human person no longer subordinate to God, free finally of the Christian structures.
But that’s to ignore the Incarnation: God became human, entered into the ordinary world, and so everything human and physical and embodied is forever holy and good, and really always has been.
It’s to ignore what faith has always really proclaimed: that the glory of God, as St. Irenaeus puts it, is the human person fully alive.
We’re always getting God wrong.
Look at the veins in those massive marble hands, and the tendons, and the muscles; see the wonderful concentration in those great marble eyes, looking out at Goliath, sizing him up.
The confidence. The poise.
The David is Christ.
The David is us.