Michelangelo

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Michelangelo
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Michelangelo Buonarroti

• Perhaps the greatest influence on western art in
  the last five centuries, Michelangelo was an
  Italian sculptor, architect, painter and poet in
  the period known as the High Renaissance. Along
  with contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci and
  Raphael, he is considered one of the greatest
  masters in the history of European art.

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Biography

• Michelangelo was one of the most inspired
  creators in the history of art and, with Leonardo
  da Vinci, the most potent force in the Italian
  High Renaissance. As a sculptor, architect,
  painter, and poet, he exerted a tremendous
  influence on his contemporaries and on subsequent
  Western art in general.

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• A Florentinealthough born March 6, 1475, in the
  small village of Caprese near ArezzoMichelangelo
  continued to have a deep attachment to his city,
  its art, and its culture throughout his long
  life. He spent the greater part of his adulthood
  in Rome, employed by the popes
  characteristically, however, he left instructions
  that he be buried in Florence, and his body was
  placed there in a fine monument in the church of
  Santa Croce.

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David

• His great works were almost entirely in the
  service of the Catholic Church, and include a
  huge statue of the Biblical hero David (over 14
  feet tall) in Florence, sculpted between 1501 and
  1504

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• David Gigantic marble, started in 1501 and
  completed in 1504 Michelangelo began work on the
  colossal figure of David in 1501, and by 1504 the
  sculpture (standing at 4.34m/14 ft 3 in tall) was
  in place outside the Palazzo Vecchio. The choice
  of David was supposed to reflect the power and
  determination of Republican Florence and was
  under constant attack from supporters of the
  usurped Medicis. In the 19th century the statue
  was moved to the Accademia.

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• The high point of Michelangelo's early style is
  the gigantic (4.34 m/14.24 ft) marble David
  (Accademia, Florence), which he produced between
  1501 and 1504, after returning to Florence. The
  Old Testament hero is depicted by Michelangelo as
  a lithe nude youth, muscular and alert, looking
  off into the distance as if sizing up the enemy
  Goliath, whom he has not yet encountered. The
  fiery intensity of David's facial expression is
  termed terribilità, a feature characteristic of
  many of Michelangelo's figures and of his own
  personality. David, Michelangelo's most famous
  sculpture, became the symbol of Florence and
  originally was placed in the Piazza della
  Signoria in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, the
  Florentine town hall.

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Sculpture
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Moses

• Michelangelo made some of his finest sculpture
  for the Julius Tomb, including the Moses (circa
  1515), the central figure in the much reduced
  monument now located in Rome's church of San
  Pietro in Vincoli. The muscular patriarch sits
  alertly in a shallow niche, holding the tablets
  of the Ten Commandments, his long beard entwined
  in his powerful hands. He looks off into the
  distance as if communicating with God.

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Pieta

• The marble Pietà (1498-1500), still in its
  original place in Saint Peter's Basilica. One of
  the most famous works of art, the Pietà was
  probably finished before Michelangelo was 25
  years old, and it is the only work he ever
  signed. The youthful Mary is shown seated
  majestically, holding the dead Christ across her
  lap, a theme borrowed from northern European art.
  Instead of revealing extreme grief, Mary is
  restrained, and her expression is one of
  resignation.

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The Dying Slave

• The Bound Slave and the Dying Slave (both c.
  1510-13), Musée du Louvre, Paris, demonstrate
  Michelangelo's approach to carving. He conceived
  of the figure as being imprisoned in the block.
  By removing the excess stone, the form was
  released. Here, as is frequently the case with
  his sculpture, Michelangelo left the statues
  unfinished (non-finito), either because he was
  satisfied with them as is, or because he no
  longer planned to use them.

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The Madonna of the Stairs
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Bacchus

• The over-life-size Bacchus (1496-98, Bargello,
  Florence). One of the few works of pagan rather
  than Christian subject matter made by the master,
  it rivaled ancient statuary, the highest mark of
  admiration in Renaissance Rome.

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Sistine Chapel

• The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome
  (commissioned by Pope Julius II), was painted
  between 1508 and 1512.

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• Michelangelo was recalled to Rome by Pope Julius
  II in 1505 for two commissions. The most
  important one was for the frescoes of the Sistine
  Chapel ceiling. Working high above the chapel
  floor, lying on his back on scaffolding,
  Michelangelo painted, between 1508 and 1512, some
  of the finest pictorial images of all time. On
  the vault of the papal chapel, he devised an
  intricate system of decoration that included nine
  scenes from the Book of Genesis, beginning with
  God Separating Light from Darkness and including
  the Creation of Adam, the Creation of Eve, the
  Temptation and Fall of Adam and Eve, and the
  Flood. These centrally located narratives are
  surrounded by alternating images of prophets and
  sibyls on marble thrones, by other Old Testament
  subjects, and by the ancestors of Christ.

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• In order to prepare for this enormous work,
  Michelangelo drew numerous figure studies and
  cartoons, devising scores of figure types and
  poses. These awesome, mighty images,
  demonstrating Michelangelo's masterly
  understanding of human anatomy and movement,
  changed the course of painting in the West.

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The Creation Of Man
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The Creation of the Heavens
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The Erythraean Sibyl
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The Fall From Grace
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The Flood
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The Prophet Zachariah
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The Last Judgement

• In Rome, in 1536, Michelangelo was at work on the
  Last Judgment for the alter wall of the Sistine
  Chapel, which he finished in 1541. The largest
  fresco of the Renaissance, it depicts Judgment
  Day. Christ, with a clap of thunder, puts into
  motion the inevitable separation, with the saved
  ascending on the left side of the painting and
  the damned descending on the right into a
  Dantesque hell. As was his custom, Michelangelo
  portrayed all the figures nude, but prudish
  draperies were added by another artist (who was
  dubbed the breeches-maker) a decade later, as
  the cultural climate became more conservative.
  Michelangelo painted his own image in the flayed
  skin of St. Bartholomew.

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The Last Judgement
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Doni Tondo

• The Holy Family with the infant St. John the
  Baptist (the Doni Tondo) c. 1503-05

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• Sybille de Cummes ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
  in Vatican City Sibyls were female seers of
  ancient Greece and Rome. They were also known as
  oracles. Like the Jewish prophets of the Old
  Testament, many sibyls had their sayings recorded
  in books. Jewish prophets spoke unbidden, whereas
  sibyls tended to speak only if consulted on
  specific questions. They sometimes answered in
  riddles or rhetorical questions.

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Sistine Chapel Virtual Tour

• http//mv.vatican.va/3_EN/pages/x-Pano/CSN/Visit_C
  SN_Main.html

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• Dome of St. Peter's Basilica Michelangelo's
  crowning achievement as an architect was his work
  at St. Peter's Basilica, where he was made chief
  architect in 1546. The building was being
  constructed according to Donato Bramante's plan,
  but Michelangelo ultimately became responsible
  for the altar end of the building on the exterior
  and for the final form of its dome.

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Michelangelo's Achievements

• During his long lifetime, Michelangelo was an
  intimate of princes and popes, from Lorenzo de'
  Medici to Leo X, Clement VIII, and Pius III, as
  well as cardinals, painters, and poets. Neither
  easy to get along with nor easy to understand, he
  expressed his view of himself and the world even
  more directly in his poetry than in the other
  arts. Much of his verse deals with art and the
  hardships he underwent, or with Neoplatonic
  philosophy and personal relationships.

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• The great Renaissance poet Ludovico Ariosto wrote
  succinctly of this famous artist Michael more
  than mortal, divine angel. Indeed, Michelangelo
  was widely awarded the epithetdivine because of
  his extraordinary accomplishments. Two
  generations of Italian painters and sculptors
  were impressed by his treatment of the human
  figure Raphael, Annabale Carracci, Pontormo,
  Rosso Fiorentino, Sebastiano del Piombo, and
  Titian. His dome for St. Peter's became the
  symbol of authority, as well as the model, for
  domes all over the Western world the majority of
  state capitol buildings in the U.S., as well as
  the Capitol in Washington, D.C., are derived from
  it.