BLACKED OUT!

If, in future, I am going to use Flickr as my new source for uploading pictures to Blogger I am going to have to be a little bit careful...

A few weeks ago, I posted the snap on the left from my old photograph album.

At a cursory glance, you might suppose that it shows a young man wearing nothing other than a rather natty hat...

Of course, the cognoscenti will correctly identify it as probably the most famous example of fifteenth-century sculpture: a bronze figure of the Biblical Patriarch (and juvenile Philistine-slayer) David by Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi (c 1386–1466), better known as Donatello.

Dates for Donatello's David vary from the 1430s to the 1460s. It is, for example, recorded as being the centerpiece of the first courtyard in the Palazzo Medici during the wedding festivities of Lorenzo de' Medici and Clarice Orsini in 1469, but some have argued that it was commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici in the 1430s to be the centerpiece of the courtyard of the older Medici house on the Via Larga. Anyway, whatever the truth, it is one of the world's great art treasurers currently housed in the Bargello Museum, Florence.

So much for David's antiquity and cultural standing, I had scarcely uploaded the photo onto flickr when someone left a comment saying that it had been blacked out. Soon afterwards, all my flickr images were hidden from view...

...even this one of a fully-clothed, outsize, Cinderella-mouse in Disneyland...

Anyway, two days of being blacked-out was finally resolved when I successfully manged to re-classify Donatello's David as a 'resticted' image (as, indeed, it remains!) and got Flickr to lift the ban on my other less potentially offensive photos! Thanks, Flickr; apologies, Donatello!

Naturally, it will be some while before Michelangelo's David finds his way onto this blog!!