Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Portrait of Michelangelo by Jacopino del Conte (after 1535) at the age of60 Birth name Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni Born 6 March 1475 Caprese near Arezzo, Republic of Florence (present-day Tuscany, Italy) 18 February 1564 (aged88) Rome, Papal States (present-day Italy) Sculpture, painting, architecture, and poetry High Renaissance David Piet Sistine Chapel Ceiling
Died
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni[] (6March 1475 18 February 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo (Italian pronunciation:[mikelandelo]), was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer of the High Renaissance who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art.[] Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci. Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist in his lifetime, and ever since then he has been held to be one of the greatest artists of all time.[] A number of his works in painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence.[] His output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century.
Two of his best-known works, the Piet and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. As an architect, Michelangelo pioneered the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library. At 74 he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan, the western end being finished to Michelangelo's design, the dome being completed after his death with some modification. In a demonstration of Michelangelo's unique standing, he was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive.[1] Two biographies were published of him during his lifetime; one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino ("the divine one").[2] One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilit, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate[3] Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.
Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Early adulthood
Lorenzo de' Medici's death on 8 April 1492 brought a reversal of Michelangelo's circumstances.[14] Michelangelo left the security of the Medici court and returned to his father's house. In the following months he carved a wooden crucifix (1493), as a gift to the prior of the Florentine church of Santo Spirito, which had permitted him some studies of anatomy on the corpses of the church's hospital.[15] Between 1493 and 1494 he bought a block of marble for a larger than life statue of Hercules, which was sent to France and subsequently disappeared sometime circa 18th century.[12][c] On 20 January 1494, after heavy snowfalls, Lorenzo's heir, Piero de Medici, commissioned a snow statue, and Michelangelo again entered the court of the Medici. In the same year, the Medici were expelled from Florence as the result of the rise of Savonarola. Michelangelo left the city before the end of the political upheaval, moving to Venice and then to Bologna.[14] In Bologna, he was commissioned to finish the carving of the last small figures of the Shrine of St. Dominic, in the church dedicated to that saint. Towards the end of 1494, the political situation in Florence was calmer. The city, previously under threat from the French, was no longer in danger as Charles VIII had suffered defeats. Michelangelo returned to Florence but received no commissions from the new city government under Savonarola. He returned to the employment of the Medici.[16] During the half year he spent in Florence, he worked on two small statues, a child St. John the Baptist and a sleeping Cupid. According to Condivi, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, for whom Michelangelo had sculpted St. John the Baptist, asked that Michelangelo "fix it so that it looked as if it had been buried" so he could "send it to Rome...pass [it off as] an ancient work and...sell it much better." Both Lorenzo and Michelangelo were unwittingly cheated out of the real value of the piece by a middleman. Cardinal Raffaele Riario, to whom Lorenzo had sold it, discovered that it was a fraud, but was so impressed by the quality of the sculpture that he invited the artist to Rome.[17] [d] This apparent success in selling his sculpture abroad as well as the conservative Florentine situation may have encouraged Michelangelo to accept the prelate's invitation.[16] Rome Michelangelo arrived in Rome 25 June 1496[18] at the age of 21. On 4 July of the same year, he began work on a commission for Cardinal Raffaele Riario, an over-life-size statue of the Roman wine god Bacchus. However, upon completion, the work was rejected by the cardinal, and subsequently entered the collection of the banker Jacopo Galli, for his garden. In November 1497, the French ambassador in the Holy See commissioned one of his most famous works, the Piet, and the contract was agreed upon in August of the following year. The contemporary opinion about this work "a revelation of all the potentialities and force of the art of sculpture" was summarized by Vasari: "It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh."
Michelangelo's Piet, a depiction of the body of Jesus on the lap of his mother Mary after the Crucifixion, was carved in 1499, when the sculptor was 24 years old.
In Rome, Michelangelo lived near the church of Santa Maria di Loreto. Here, according to the legend, he fell in love with Vittoria Colonna, marchioness of Pescara and a poet.[citation needed] Michelangelo's house was demolished in 1874, and the remaining architectural elements saved by the new proprietors were destroyed in 1930. Today a modern reconstruction of Michelangelo's house can be seen on the Janiculum hill. It is also during this period that skeptics allege Michelangelo executed the sculpture Laocon and His Sons which resides in the Vatican.[19]
Michelangelo
Statue of David
Michelangelo returned to Florence in 14991501. The republic was changing after the fall of anti-Renaissance Priest and leader of Florence, Girolamo Savonarola, (executed in 1498) and the rise of the gonfaloniere Piero Soderini. He was asked by the consuls of the Guild of Wool to complete an unfinished project begun 40 years earlier by Agostino di Duccio: a colossal statue portraying David as a symbol of Florentine freedom, to be placed in the Piazza della Signoria, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Michelangelo responded by completing his most famous work, the Statue of David, in 1504. This masterwork, created out of a marble block from the quarries at Carrara, one that had already been worked on by an earlier hand, definitively established his prominence as a sculptor of extraordinary technical skill and strength of symbolic imagination.
Also during this period, Michelangelo painted the Holy Family and St John, also known as the Doni Tondo or the Holy Family of the Tribune: it was commissioned for the marriage of Angelo Doni and Maddalena Strozzi and in the 17th century, hung in the room known as the Tribune in the Uffizi. He also may have painted the Madonna and Child with John the Baptist, known as the Manchester Madonna and now in the National Gallery, London, United Kingdom.
The Statue of David, completed by Michelangelo in 1504, is one of the most renowned works of the Renaissance.
During the same period, Michelangelo took the commission to paint Chapel; the work took approximately four years to complete (15081512) the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took approximately four years to complete (15081512). According to Michelangelo's account, Bramante and Raphael convinced the Pope to commission Michelangelo in a medium not familiar to the artist in order that he, Michelangelo, would suffer unfavorable comparisons with his rival Raphael, who at the time was the leading painter in fresco in Rome. However, this story is discounted by modern historians on the grounds of contemporary evidence, and may merely have been a reflection of the artist's own perspective. Michelangelo was originally commissioned to paint the Twelve Apostles against a starry sky, but proposed a different and more complex scheme, representing creation, the Fall of Man and the Promise of Salvation through the prophets, and the genealogy of Christ. The work is part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel which represents much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church. The composition eventually contained over 300 figures and had at its center nine episodes from the Book of Genesis, divided into three groups: God's Creation of the Earth; God's Creation of Humankind and their fall from God's grace; and lastly, the state of Humanity as represented by Noah and his family. On the pendentives supporting the ceiling are painted twelve men and women who prophesied the coming of the Jesus. They are seven prophets of Israel and five Sibyls, prophetic women of the Classical world.
Michelangelo Among the most famous paintings on the ceiling are The Creation of Adam, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Great Flood, the Prophet Isaiah and the Cumaean Sibyl. Around the windows are painted the ancestors of Christ.
Michelangelo's Moses (centre) with Rachel and Leah on his sides, completed in 1515
In 1527, the Florentine citizens, encouraged by the sack of Rome, threw out the Medici and restored the republic. A siege of the city ensued, and Michelangelo went to the aid of his beloved Florence by working on the city's fortifications from 1528 to 1529. The city fell in 1530 and the Medici were restored to power. Completely out of sympathy with the repressive reign of the ducal Medici, Michelangelo left Florence for good in the mid-1530s, leaving assistants to complete the Medici chapel.
Michelangelo masterpiece. A faithful uncensored copy of the original, by Marcello Venusti, can be seen at the Capodimonte Museum of Naples. Censorship always followed Michelangelo, once described as "inventor delle porcherie" ("inventor of obscenities", in the original Italian language referring to "pork things"). The infamous "fig-leaf campaign" of the Counter-Reformation, aiming to cover all representations of human genitals in paintings and sculptures, started with Michelangelo's works. To give two examples, the marble statue of Cristo della Minerva (church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome) was covered by added drapery, as it remains today, and the statue of the naked child Jesus in Madonna of Bruges (The Church of Our Lady in Bruges, Michelangelo designed the dome of St. Peter's Belgium) remained covered for several decades. Also, the plaster copy Basilica on or before 1564, although it was of the David in the Cast Courts (Victoria and Albert Museum) in unfinished when he died. London, has a fig leaf in a box at the back of the statue. It was there to be placed over the statue's genitals so that they would not upset visiting female royalty. In 1546, Michelangelo was appointed architect of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, and designed its dome. As St. Peter's was progressing, there was concern that Michelangelo would pass away before the dome was finished. However, once building commenced on the lower part of the dome, the supporting ring, the completion of the design was inevitable. Michelangelo died in Rome at the age of 88 (three weeks before his 89th birthday). His body was brought back from Rome for interment at the Basilica of Santa Croce, fulfilling the maestro's last request to be buried in his beloved Florence.
Michelangelo
Disputed works
A number of works attributed to Michelangelo are disputed. These include the Palestrina Piet and the paintings The Manchester Madonna and The Torment of Saint Anthony, newly acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum, USA (previously attributed to "Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio", and having had two previously unsuccessful attempts at attribution to the hand of Michelangelo). In addition, the Cupid sculpture "rediscovered" in the French Embassy in New York in 1996 (now on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art) has also been inconclusively attributed to Michelangelo.[21]
Michelangelo
Architectural work
Michelangelo worked on many projects that had been started by other men, most notably in his work at St Peter's Basilica, Rome. The Campidoglio, designed by Michelangelo during the same period, rationalized the structures and spaces of Rome's Capitoline Hill. Its shape, more a rhomboid than a square, was intended to counteract the effects of perspective. The major Florentine architectural projects by Michelangelo are the unexecuted faade for the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence, and the Medici Chapel (Capella Medicea) and Laurentian Library there, and the fortifications of Florence. The major Roman projects are St. Peter's, Palazzo Farnese, San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, the Sforza Chapel (Capella Sforza) in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, Porta Pia and Santa Maria degli Angeli.
Laurentian Library
Around 1530, Michelangelo designed the Laurentian Library in Florence, attached to the church of San Lorenzo. He produced new styles such as pilasters tapering thinner at the bottom, and a staircase with contrasting rectangular and curving forms.
Michelangelo's own tomb in which he was interred in February 1564, at Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence
Medici Chapel
Michelangelo designed the Medici Chapel and in fact used his own discretion to create its composition. The Medici Chapel has monuments in it dedicated to certain members of the Medici family. Michelangelo never finished the project, so his pupils later completed it. Two wall-tombs intended for the brothers Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici are found within the entry chambers of the tombs. They are adorned with allegorical figures of the times of day (Night & Day on Giuliano's side and Dusk & Dawn on Lorenzo's side.) Lorenzo the Magnificent was buried at the entrance wall of the Medici Chapel. Sculptures of the "Madonna and Child" and the Medici patron saints Cosmas and Damian were set over his burial. The "Madonna and Child" was Michelangelo's own work. The concealed corridor with wall drawings of Michelangelo's under the New Sacristy was discovered in 1976.[22][23]
Personal life
In his personal life, Michelangelo was abstemious. He told his apprentice, Ascanio Condivi: "However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man."[24] Condivi said he was indifferent to food and drink, eating "more out of necessity than of pleasure"[24] and that he "often slept in his clothes and ... boots."[24] His biographer Paolo Giovio says, "His nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him."[25] He may not have minded, since he was by nature a solitary and melancholy person, bizzarro e fantastico, a man who "withdrew himself from the company of men."[26]
Michelangelo
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La carne terra, e qui l'ossa mia, prive de' lor begli occhi, e del leggiadro aspetto fan fede a quel ch'i' fu grazia nel letto, che abbracciava, e' n che l'anima vive. []
The flesh now earth, and here my bones, Bereft of handsome eyes, and jaunty air, Still loyal are to him I joyed in bed, Whom I embraced, in whom my soul now lives.
Some of the objects of Michelangelo's affections, and subjects of his poetry, took advantage of him: the model Febo di Poggio asked for money in response to a love-poem, and a second model, Gherardo Perini, stole from him shamelessly.[29] The openly homoerotic nature of the poetry has been a source of discomfort to later generations. Michelangelo's grandnephew, Michelangelo the Younger, published them in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed,[30] and it was not until John Addington Symonds translated them into English in 1893 that the original genders were restored. Even in modern times some scholars continue to insist that, despite the restoration of the pronouns, they represent "an emotionless and elegant re-imagining of Platonic dialogue, whereby erotic poetry was seen as an expression of refined sensibilities".[29]
Michelangelo Late in life, Michelangelo nurtured a great love for the poet and noble widow Vittoria Colonna, whom he met in Rome in 1536 or 1538 and who was in her late forties at the time. They wrote sonnets for each other and were in regular contact until she died. Condivi recalls Michelangelo's saying that his sole regret in life was that he did not kiss the widow's face in the same manner that he had her hand.[31]
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Footnotes
a. ^ Michelangelo's father marks the date as 6 March 1474 in the Florentine manner ab Incarnatione. However, in the Roman manner, ab Nativitate, it is 1475. b. ^ Sources disagree as to how old Michelangelo was when he departed for school. De Tolnay writes that it was at ten years old while Sedgwick notes in her translation of Condivi that Michelangelo was seven. c. ^ The Strozzi family acquired the sculpture Hercules. Filippo Strozzi sold it to Francis I in 1529. In 1594, Henry IV installed it in the Jardin d'Estang at Fontainebleau where it disappeared in 1713 when the Jardin d'Estange was destroyed. d. ^ Vasari makes no mention of this episode and Paolo Giovio's Life of Michelangelo indicates that Michelangelo tried to pass the statue off as an antique himself.
References
[1] Michelangelo. (2008). Encyclopdia Britannica. Ultimate Reference Suite. [3] Art and Illusion, E. H. Gombrich, ISBN 9780691070001 [4] J. de Tolnay, The Youth of Michelangelo, 11 [5] C. Clment, Michelangelo, 5 [6] A. Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, 5 [7] A. Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, 9 [8] R. Liebert, Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of his Life and Images, 59 [9] C. Clment, Michelangelo, 7 [10] C. Clment, Michelangelo, 9 [11] J. de Tolnay, The Youth of Michelangelo, 1819 [12] A. Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, 15 [14] J. de Tolnay, The Youth of Michelangelo, 2021 [15] A. Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, 17 [16] J. de Tolnay, The Youth of Michelangelo, 2425 [17] A. Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, 1920 [18] J. de Tolnay, The Youth of Michelangelo, 2628 [19] Catterson, Lynn. "Michelangelo's 'Laocon?'" Artibus et historiae. 52. 2005: p. 33 [22] Peter Barenboim, Sergey Shiyan, Michelangelo: Mysteries of Medici Chapel, SLOVO, Moscow, 2006 (http:/ / www. florentine-society. ru/ Medici_Chapel_Mysteries. htm). ISBN 5-85050-825-2 [23] Peter Barenboim, "Michelangelo Drawings Key to the Medici Chapel Interpretation", Moscow, Letny Sad, 2006, ISBN 5-98856-016-4 [24] Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, p. 106. [25] Paola Barocchi (ed.) Scritti d'arte del cinquecento, Milan, 1971; vol. I p. 10. [26] Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, p. 102. [27] Hughes, Anthony, "Michelangelo", page 326. Phaidon, 1997. [28] Scigliano, Eric: "Michelangelo's Mountain; The Quest for Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara." (http:/ / books. simonandschuster. ca/ 9780743254779), Simon and Schuster, 2005. Retrieved 27 January 2007 [29] Hughes, Anthony: "Michelangelo.", page 326. Phaidon, 1997. [30] Rictor Norton, "The Myth of the Modern Homosexual"., page 143. Cassell, 1997. [31] A. Condivi (ed. Hellmut Wohl), 'The Life of Michelangelo,' p. 103, Phaidon, 1976.
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Further reading
Ackerman, James (1986). The Architecture of Michelangelo. University of Chicago Press. ISBN978-0-226-00240-8. Clment, Charles (1892). Michelangelo (http://books.google.com/?id=G-sDAAAAYAAJ& printsec=frontcover&dq=michelangelo). Harvard University, Digitized 25 June 2007: S. Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, ltd.: London. Condivi, Ascanio; Alice Sedgewick (1553). The Life of Michelangelo. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN0-271-01853-4. Baldini, Umberto; Liberto Perugi (1982). The Sculpture of Michelangelo (http://books.google.com/ ?id=pCEWAQAAIAAJ). Rizzoli. ISBN0-8478-0447-X. Barenboim, Peter and Shiyan, Sergey (2011). Michelangelo in the Medici Chapel: Genius in details (English, Russian). Moscow: Looom. ISBN 978-5-9903067-1-4 Einem, Herbert von (1973). Michelangelo. Trans. Ronald Taylor. London: Methuen. Gilbert, Creighton (1994). Michelangelo On and Off the Sistine Ceiling. New York: George Braziller. Hibbard, Howard (1974). Michelangelo. New York: Harper & Row. Hirst, Michael and Jill Dunkerton. (1994) The Young Michelangelo: The Artist in Rome 14961501. London: National Gallery Publications. Liebert, Robert (1983). Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of his Life and Images. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN0-300-02793-1. Nret, Gilles (2000). Michelangelo. Taschen. ISBN978-3-8228-5976-6. Pietrangeli, Carlo, et al. (1994). The Sistine Chapel: A Glorious Restoration. New York: Harry N. Abrams Sala, Charles (1996). Michelangelo: Sculptor, Painter, Architect. Editions Pierre Terrail. ISBN978-2-87939-069-7. Saslow, James M. (1991). The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Rolland, Romain (2009). Michelangelo. BiblioLife. ISBN1-110-00353-6. Seymour, Charles, Jr. (1972). Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Ceiling. New York: W. W. Norton. Stone, Irving (1987). The Agony and the Ecstasy. Signet. ISBN0-451-17135-7. Summers, David (1981). Michelangelo and the Language of Art. Princeton University Press. Tolnay, Charles (1947). The Youth of Michelangelo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tolnay, Charles de. (1964). The Art and Thought of Michelangelo. 5 vols. New York: Pantheon Books. Wallace, William E. (2011). Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times (http://www.themontrealreview. com/2009/Michelangelo-the-artist-the-man-and-his-times-by-William-Wallace.php). Cambridge University Press. ISBN1-107-67369-0. Wilde, Johannes (1978). Michelangelo: Six Lectures. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
External links
Works by Michelangelo Buonarroti (http://www.gutenberg.org/author/Michelangelo+Buonarroti) at Project Gutenberg The Digital Michelangelo Project (http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/) The BP Special Exhibition Michelangelo Drawings closer to the master (http://www.britishmuseum.org/ explore/online_tours/europe/michelangelos_drawings/michelangelos_drawings.aspx) Michelangelo's Drawings: Real or Fake? (http://www.zipser.nl/michelangelo1.html) How to decide if a drawing is by Michelangelo. Januszczak, Waldemar (5 March 2006). "The Michelangelo Code" (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ life_and_style/article734500.ece). The Sunday Times., suggesting Michelangelo's coded use of his knowledge of
Michelangelo anatomy. Wikipedia:Link rot "Michelangelo: The Man and the Myth" (http://michelangelo.syr.edu/)
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License
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License
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