Michelangelo’s “David” (1501-1504) caused a sensation this year: a director from Florida was forced to resign after parents complained an art teacher showed his sixth-grade students the Renaissance sculpture, and an Italian restaurant had to partially conceal the statue’s genitals in a Scottish Underground advertisement. Today ‘David’ is making headlines again after Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism won a lawsuit against Edizioni Condé Nastwho published a magazine cover with a model posing as the sculpture three years ago.
The publisher used the likeness of the Renaissance sculpture for the August 2020 edition of GQ Italy, superimposing a photograph of model Pietro Boselli over “David” and ultimately creating the image of a chiseled modern man posing as the 16th-century statue. Edizioni Condé Nast did not pay user fees to the Galleria dell’Accademia, which exposed the statue since 1873. The court in Florence ruled in favor of the Italian Ministry of Culture on May 15, making the damning statement that the magazine had “insidiously and maliciously” juxtaposed the images of Boselli and David”, “degrading, obscuring , mortifying”. , and humiliating the high symbolic and identity value of the work of art.
Now, Edizioni Condé Nast will have to pay the Galleria dell’Accademia the license fee of €20,000 (~$21,445) and a fine of €30,000 (~$32,170) for the way it altered the image. .
In a statement shared with HyperallergicGalleria dell’Accademia director Cecilie Hollberg called the decision “another great achievement.”
“A principle has now been affirmed that goes beyond the individual case,” Hollberg said.
Elsewhere in Florence, the Uffizi Gallery for follow-up last year, fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier for the company’s use of “Birth of Venus(1482-1485). Earlier this spring, an Italian court ruled in favor of another museum, the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, in its lawsuit against a German toy manufacturer. The company used Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” (circa 1490) on a puzzle.
“David”, “Birth of Venus” and “Vitruvian Man” are all in the public domain. The demands of museums diverge of standard European Union law and revolves around a section of the Italian constitution that protects cultural heritage images. The clause “guarantees the right to personal identity, understood as the right not to have one’s intellectual, political, social, religious, ideological or professional heritage altered or distorted” and protects “the right to collective identity of citizens who identify themselves as belonging to that same nation, also by virtue of the artistic and cultural heritage that is part of the memory of the national community”.
