The first thing he had seen, as he turned into the square, was the back of one of these Bandinelli statues:  a great naked man of marble, with a heavy back and strong naked flanks over which the water was trickling.  And then to come immediately upon the David, so much whiter, glistening skin-white in the wet, standing a little forward, and shrinking.

He may be ugly, too naturalistic, too big, and anything else you like.  But the David in the Piazza della Signoria, there under the dark great palace, in the position Michelangelo chose for him, there, standing forward stripped and exposed and eternally half-shrinking, half—­wishing to expose himself, he is the genius of Florence.  The adolescent, the white, self-conscious, physical adolescent:  enormous, in keeping with the stark, grim, enormous palace, which is dark and bare as he is white and bare.  And behind, the big, lumpy Bandinelli men are in keeping too.  They may be ugly—­but they are there in their place, and they have their own lumpy reality.  And this morning in the rain, standing unbroken, with the water trickling down their flanks and along the inner side of their great thighs, they were real enough, representing the undaunted physical nature of the heavier Florentines.

Aaron looked and looked at the three great naked men.  David so much white, and standing forward, self-conscious:  then at the great splendid front of the Palazzo Vecchio:  and at the fountain splashing water upon its wet, wet figures; and the distant equestrian statue; and the stone-flagged space of the grim square.  And he felt that here he was in one of the world’s living centres, here, in the Piazza della Signoria.  The sense of having arrived—­of having reached a perfect centre of the human world:  this he had.

And so, satisfied, he turned round to look at the bronze Perseus which rose just above him.  Benvenuto Cellini’s dark hero looked female, with his plump hips and his waist, female and rather insignificant:  graceful, and rather vulgar.  The clownish Bandinellis were somehow more to the point.—­Then all the statuary in the Loggia!  But that is a mistake.  It looks too much like the yard of a monumental mason.

The great, naked men in the rain, under the dark-grey November sky, in the dark, strong inviolable square!  The wonderful hawk-head of the old palace.  The physical, self-conscious adolescent, Michelangelo’s David, shrinking and exposing himself, with his white, slack limbs!  Florence, passionate, fearless Florence had spoken herself out.—­Aaron was fascinated by the Piazza della Signoria.  He never went into the town, nor returned from it to his lodging, without contriving to pass through the square.  And he never passed through it without satisfaction.  Here men had been at their intensest, most naked pitch, here, at the end of the old world and the beginning of the new.  Since then, always rather puling and apologetic.