Michelangelo sculpted his famous David statue from a marble block that had been previously worked on and then abandoned by two different artists, Agostino di Duccio and Antonio Rossellino. Both artists had begun working before deciding that the stone had too many imperfections. The marble block then sat untouched for roughly 40 years before Michelangelo began working with it, and when he began Michelangelo had to sculpt around or reshape some of the work performed by the previous artists. The end result of his efforts was the 17-foot-tall, 5.5 ton David, which is still on display in Florence, Italy.
