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The deviating eyes of Michelangelo's David.

In 1501 Michelangelo received a commission from the Guild of Wool Merchants of Florence to carve out a giant statue for one of the buttresses of the Cathedral of Florence. The David was started in 1501 when Michelangelo was only 26 years of age, and finished in 1504, when he was not yet 30, and stands as a testament to Michelangelo’s mastery of the human form and sculpture. Previous works had shown the subject just after he had slain and beheaded Goliath. Michelangelo’s David broke new ground by depicting a ‘most beautiful animal preparing to kill—not by savagery and brute force, but by intellect and skill’.1 Direct anatomical dissection was forbidden during the Renaissance and artists who wished to view the inside of the human body had to do so almost in secret. When Michelangelo fashioned a life-sized wooden crucifix altarpiece for the Santo Spirito in Florence, the prior allowed him access to bodies awaiting burial.2 The practice of anatomy became a passion for Michelangelo and his works correctly demonstrated numerous anatomical structures. He even contemplated publishing a treatise on anatomy together with his physician, Realdo Colombo, who treated him for kidney stones and later rose to become professor and medical consultant to the Vatican.3 So real were Michelangelo’s works that they were used as models by other artists of the era and for centuries afterwards. In addition, ‘pathological’ features in his paintings and sculptures have attracted much attention in medical journals.4 For all Michelangelo’s mastery of human anatomy, the David possesses certain anatomical imperfections. The right hand is bigger than the left with an enlarged abductor digiti minimi—suggested as a device to draw attention to the stone as a symbol of his courage and physical power.5 Yet the most significant anomaly is in the David ’s eyes, which seem to manifest an exodeviation. The right eye is in the primary position while the left eye appears to be looking out to the left (Figure 1). The likely reason why this detail has been unrecognized for hundreds of years is that most viewers have been physically unable to examine the David at eye level and at arms-length. The statue, about 5 metres tall in addition to its supporting pedestal, was meant to be viewed from below and, presumably, at a distance. In 1999, the Digital Michelangelo Project, led by Stanford University and Marc Levoy, professor of computer science and engineering, rendered a three-dimensional computer model that permitted the work to be viewed from different angles and with varying light intensity and colour modulation.6 A digitally rendered direct frontal image—a perspective not easily attainable by photography and