Michelangelo’s (1501-1504) ‘David’ just can’t get a break: Scottish advertisers recently deemed the 17ft marble sculpture too explicit to feature in Glasgow Underground advertisements.
In March, the statue was the subject of a heated debate over censorship when conservative parents in a Tallahassee school district found the Renaissance artwork to be “pornographic” and unsuitable for the sixth-grade art history curriculum. Parental repression led to the sudden resignation from the principal of the Tallahassee Classical School, Hope Carrasquilla (who was then officially invited to Florence by the city’s mayor and received a warm welcome at the Galleria dell’Accademia, where “David” is housed.)
The most recent controversial Tube advertising campaign was led by Barolo, an Italian restaurant in Glasgow city center which is part of the DRG Group, which also owns a number of hotel businesses in various Scottish cities. The original draft of the ad featured a cropped image of the biblical shepherd eating a slice of pizza to promote authentic Italian Barolo cuisine, along with the tagline “It doesn’t get more Italian”.
But Global, the advertising company that manages Glasgow’s Underground advertising space, rejected the draft because “it’s art but it’s still nudity”, according to DRG Group.
“It is a globally recognized work of art. It is taught in schools. People from all over the world travel to see it,” DRG Group Director Mario Gizzi said in a statement to Hyperallergic.
“It’s not the 1500s anymore, it’s 2023,” he continued. “Are we really saying that the people of Glasgow can’t stand to see a naked statue?
Nadine Carmichael, DRG Group Head of Sales and Marketing, said BBC to reporters that the firm has returned to Global with another edition of the poster, this time using stickers to cover the statue’s crotch. “The comments were that they weren’t big enough,” Carmichael told the BBC.
The hotel group eventually came back with another version, cropping the image of “David” from the waist down. This change was eventually approved by Global.
“We finally got there,” Carmichael said. She also explained that the DRG Group considered a number of iconic Italian artworks as potential options for the ad campaign, including Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ (c. 1503-1517).
“Barolo is all about the classic cuisine of Italy and Michelangelo’s David is one of the country’s most famous works of art – as the advertisement states, it doesn’t get more Italian than that,” Gizzi said.
Global has not yet responded to Hyperallergicimmediate request for comments.
