Jean-Antonin Mercié (1845-1916) produced his composition of David with the head of Goliath in plaster while in Rome in the 1870s. In the Paris Salon of 1872 it won him a first class medal. It was one of his most successful compositions and along with his later Gloria Victis bronze reductions of it were much in demand. In this figure he achieves a tremendous physical and emotional energy that fully exhibits his compositional skill and masterly handling of bronze. Mercié's reverence for the Italian Renaissance shines through this work reflective as it is of Donatello's David, Cellini's Perseus and the ignudi and Sybyls of the sistine Chapel.