Ludwig,

Your guess is as good as mine - perhaps Michelangelo ran out of marble?

: )

Option 1: Dr. Pietro Antonio Bernabei of the Careggi hospital in Florence and Prof. Massimo Gulisano, an anatomist at Florence University, recently announced that every detail of the sculpture "is consistent with the combined effects of fear, tension and aggression," The tension of the moment even accounts, according to Bernabei, for "a contraction of the reproductive organs,"

Option 2: They are realistic. It is the rest of the statue which at 5.17m is two and a half times normal scale.

Option 3: Poirot is correct and Michelangelo got his rocks off
an amateur purveyor.

It is said that males have a choice. Either the blood goes to the active brain which means there is not enough for the penis or the penis is in control and the brain shuts off. David was thinking in high gear.

This quote from the web:

"Michelangelo ... uses an ingenious technique -
giving authority to his sculptures through
lack of proportion for some parts ..."

In the case of the statue of David ... "The hands,
knotted and extremely beautiful, the face which
with the neck is bigger than half the chest. It is
in the hands and face that the virtues of universal
man are to be found, in other owrds, physical strength
and the intellectual reasoning of man. The entire work
represents, in this sense, a perfect synthesis of the
Florentine Renaissance."

Interesting Lexi.

Somewhat proportionally larger face and hands makes sense, in order to make a figure look more imposing. But to then put extremely tiny genitalia on it seems entirely counter-intuitive. Surely by the same reasoning, David should have a hooter of a dick and balls the size of melons!!

If one googles "david michelangelo pene piccolo" one will find a number of references in Italian to the tiny appurtenance attached to David.

Perhaps a poster conversant in Italian can tell us about the discussion. I tried the translate option, but it didn't seem to work.