Scottish censors are saying “ciao, ciao” to the lower half of one of Italy’s most iconic statues.
Advertising watchdogs in Glasgow forced an Italian restaurant to amend its subway ads featuring Michelangelo’s “David” statue this month – just weeks after Florida principal was axed for showing the “pornographic” masterpiece to students.
The head honchos at Global, an ad giant that governs the city’s subway spaces, had “modesty concerns” about posters for the eatery Barolo that featured a shot of “David’ famously nude, chiseled figure nibbling a slice of pizza, the Glasgow Herald reported.
While the original design showed the Renaissance sculpture cropped at the knees above the tagline “It doesn’t get more Italian,” Giant ordered a full reprint with “David” cut off at the waist so the Biblical shepherd’s genitals are out of view.
Mario Gizzi, director of the DRG Group, which runs Barolo and several other restaurants, told the outlet the company was “bemused” by the censors’ reaction.
“This is a globally recognised piece of art. It is taught in schools. People from all over the world travel to see it,” he said.
“It’s not the 1500s anymore, it’s 2023. Are we really saying that the people of Glasgow can’t handle seeing a naked statue?
“Barolo is all about Italy’s classic cooking and Michelangelo’s David is one of the country’s most famous artworks – as the ad states, it doesn’t get more Italian than that.”
Nadine Carmichael, DRG’s head of sales and marketing, told the BBC that the team offered to obscure the statue’s groin with an Italian flag sticker.
“The feedback [from Global] was that [the flags] weren’t actually big enough,” she explained.
Carmichael also shared that DRG initially considered several other Italian artworks for the ad, including Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.”
The Glasgow controversy is not the first time “David” has sent shockwaves through the British Isles: When a plaster cast of the marble masterpiece was presented to Queen Victoria in 1856, the monarch was allegedly so shocked by its nudity that a proportional fig leaf was made to cover the genitalia.
The iconic work – which was created between 1501 and 1504 – also recently caused uproar in Tallahassee, where a school principal was reportedly forced to resign after parents complained about a “pornographic” art lesson that featured both “David” and the “Creation of Adam” fresco.
“We think [‘David’ is] beautiful, but we are going to make sure the concept of parental rights is supreme in Florida and at our charter school,” school board chair Barney Bishop said of the ouster at the time.
Cecilie Hollberg, the director of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, where the statue is housed, slammed the board’s response and invited those concerned to view the work in-person.
“To think that David could be pornographic means truly not understanding the contents of the Bible, not understanding Western culture and not understanding Renaissance art,” she told The Post over the phone.