David and Goliath or David Killing Goliath is a double-sided oil on slate painting by Italian mannerist painter Daniele da Volterra, created . It is held in the Louvre, in Paris. Both sides show the same scene.
History.
A commission from Italian author Giovanni Della Casa, Archbishop of Benevento, it uses the composition from a drawing by Michelangelo, Volterra's friend and teacher. It shows Volterra engaging with the contemporaneous debate on whether painting or sculpture was the superior art form; being double-sided allowed the work to compete with sculpture. He produced a clay maquette for the work and chose a very large and flat piece of slate. The slate broke during the process of painting, and was repaired with two barely-visible tenons.
The work belonged to after the death of Giovanni Della Casa, and was offered nearly two centuries later to Louis XIV on 31 July 1715 as a Michelangelo. It was restored at the Louvre in 2007, repairing rain damage from a storm which broke the glass ceiling at the Château de Fontainebleau.