David is Stripped of Dirt - But Not Dignity

Not many people get to look Michelangelo's David straight in the eyes. But Cinzia Parnigoni, equipped with brushes, a microscope and a bottle of distilled water, does so every day.

Since David's controversial clean-up began almost a month ago, she has run her hands between the marble fingers of this icon of male physical perfection, poked her paintbrush in his eyes and ears, and picked old plaster out of cracks in his arms.

'I felt so much emotion when I found myself face to face with this giant,' said Parnigoni, spectacles dangling over a baggy T-shirt as she paused from her work in the Galleria dell'Accademia this week. 'My heart was beating too fast. I had to call the doctor.'

Slowly but surely, despite concern in the international art world over whether anyone should be touching one of the world's most admired statues at all, Parnigoni has stripped 130 years of grime from the statue's perfectly proportioned left elbow, providing a glimpse of what is to come. By spring next year, in time for his 500th birthday, she aims to have cleaned every nook and cranny of this famous but filthy marble man.

'It's like lifting a curtain or removing a shadow,' Parnigoni smiles, as David looms 17 feet tall behind her.

But even though the head of Florence's museums, Antonio Paulucci, says the method being used on David is so gentle that 'you could use the same materials to wash a newborn baby', international art experts are anxious that the cleaning could damage or irretrievably alter the Renaissance masterpiece.

But calls for an independent committee to assess the cleaning methods have been ignored and Paulucci has accused the leader of the protests, Columbia University professor James Beck, of 'going too far with this anti-restoration terrorism'.

'It's total cultural arrogance from the Florentine authorities,' said Beck, founder of the US-based Artwatch International. 'The statue's skin should be allowed to age, almost organically. Instead, they are homogenising it. I would not be surprised if they touch it up in the end with chalk.'

Beck, who also led protests over the cleaning of Michelangelo's frescoes in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel, is at the head of 50 international art experts who have called for David to stay dirty until international experts agree on how he should be washed.

His protest began after restorer Agnese Parronchi resigned from the David project in April. She gave up the top job in her field, unwilling to collaborate in a clean-up she feared could damage the statue. The gallery directors dismissed her proposed 'dry' method, using hairbrushes, saying it would only rub dirt further into the statue's marble 'pores'.

Parnigoni's method is far gentler than that of her nineteenth-century predecessor, who doused the filthy statue with hydrochloric acid in 1873 after it was brought inside from the Piazza della Signoria. And it follows 11 years of computerised research into the state of the statue.

Although Parnigoni says she never expected to land the job, she has 20 years of experience, including cleaning Michelangelo's four 'Prisoners', figures still trapped in their marble blocks in the Accademia gallery.

Each day, as a sea of tourists continues to swim past down below, she applies a 'mud pack' made from cellulose pulp and clay to small patches of the statue's 'skin' using a sheet of rice paper to stop the 'mud' even touching it. Distilled water and soft brushes remove the last spots of dirt.

But organisers admit there are some stains that will need a tougher approach. Some 15 splashes of beeswax will not shift without using a mineral solvent, and the curly stone hair, attacked by rain and pigeons over the centuries, is caked with 'black crusts'.

The wax splashes are thought to have been inflicted by Florentines who clambered all over the statue carrying dripping flame torches while it stood for more than 300 years in the Piazza della Signoria.

'Wax penetrates marble. It is the hardest thing to shift,' said France Falletti, director of the Accademia Gallery, explaining the plan to use a gentle solvent to make the splashes less visible. The method for cleaning David's hair has yet to be explained.

'It is very worrying,' said Beck. 'They are changing the image we have known for over 100 years. All for a birthday party.'

Falletti says her greatest concern now is how to keep the statue from going grey again. Unable to put a glass box around it, the gallery is considering blasting air from the floor to create an invisible wall between David and the world, saving him from the Florentine dust and the breath of 1.2 million visitors per year.