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Michelangelo

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Artists

   Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
   Chalk portrait of Michelangelo by Daniele da Volterra
   Birth name Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
         Born March 6, 1475
              near Arezzo, in Caprese, Tuscany
         Died February 18, 1564
              Rome
        Field sculpture, painting, architecture and poetry
     Training Apprentice to Domenico Ghirlandaio
     Movement High Renaissance

   Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni ( March 6, 1475 – February
   18, 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance
   painter, sculptor, architect, poet and engineer. 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 rival and
   fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci. Indeed it was said that a true
   Renaissance man needed to have all these talents and also to have been
   a diplomat and that Michelangelo was the only person to have ever
   embodied these criteria.

   Michelangelo's 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 Pietà and the David, were sculpted before he turned thirty.
   Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of
   the most influential fresco paintings in the history of Western art:
   the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgement on the
   altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Later in life he designed the
   dome of St Peter's Basilica in the same city and revolutionised
   classical architecture with his invention of the giant order of
   pilasters.

   Uniquely for a Renaissance artist, two biographies were published of
   Michelangelo during his own 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"), an appropriate sobriquet
   given his intense spirituality. One of the qualities most admired by
   his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring
   grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate
   Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in
   the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance,
   Mannerism.

Early life

   Bust of Michelangelo on the roof of St Peter's Basilica, Rome
   Bust of Michelangelo on the roof of St Peter's Basilica, Rome

   Michelangelo was born in Caprese near Arezzo, Tuscany. His father,
   Lodovico di Leonardo di Buonarotti di Simoni, was the resident
   magistrate in Caprese and podestà of Chiusi. His mother was Francesca
   di Neri del Miniato di Siena. The Buonarroti claim to descend from
   Countess Mathilde of Canossa, the family considered themselves of minor
   nobility. However, Michelangelo was raised in Florence and later,
   during the prolonged illness and after the death of his mother, lived
   with a stonecutter and his wife and family in the town of Settignano
   where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm. Michelangelo
   once said to the biographer of artists Giorgio Vasari, "What little
   good I have within me came from the pure air of your native Arezzo and
   the chisels and hammers."

   Against his father's wishes and after a period of grammatics studies
   with the humanist Francesco da Urbino, Michelangelo continued his
   apprenticeship in painting with Domenico Ghirlandaio and in sculpture
   with Bertoldo di Giovanni. Michelangelo's father was able to get
   Ghirlandaio to pay the young artist, which was unheard of at the time.
   In fact, most apprentices paid their masters for the education.
   Impressed, Domenico recommended him to the ruler of the city, Lorenzo
   de' Medici, and Michelangelo left his workshop in 1489. From 1490 to
   1492, Michelangelo attended Lorenzo's school and was influenced by many
   prominent people who modified and expanded his ideas on art, following
   the dominant Platonic view of that age, and even his feelings about
   sexuality. It was during this period that Michelangelo met literary
   personalities like Pico della Mirandola, Angelo Poliziano and Marsilio
   Ficino.

   In this period Michelangelo finished Madonna of the Steps (1490–1492)
   and Battle of the Centaurs (1491–1492). The latter was based on a theme
   suggested by Poliziano and was commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici. After
   the death of Lorenzo on April 8, 1492, for whom Michelangelo had become
   a kind of son, Michelangelo quit the Medici court. In the following
   months he produced a Wooden crucifix (1493), as a thanksgiving gift to
   the prior of the church of Santa Maria del Santo Spirito who had
   permitted him some studies of anatomy on the corpses of the church's
   Hospital. Between 1493 and 1494 he bought the marble for a larger than
   life statue of Hercules, which was sent to France and disappeared
   sometime in the 1700s. He could again enter the court on January 20,
   1494, Piero de Medici commissioned a snow statue from him. But that
   year the Medici were expelled from Florence after the Savonarola rise,
   and Michelangelo also left the city before the end of the political
   upheaval, moving to Venice and then to Bologna. He did stay in Florence
   for a while hiding in a small room underneath San Lorenzo that can
   still be visited to this day. There are still some charcoal sketches on
   the walls which Michelangelo drew from his memory.

   Here he was commissioned to finish the carving of the last small
   figures of the tomb and shrine of St. Dominic, in the church with the
   same name. He returned to Florence at the end of 1494, but soon he fled
   again, scared by the turmoils and by the menace of the French invasion.

   He was again in his city between the end of 1495 and the June of 1496:
   whereas Leonardo da Vinci considered the ruling Savonarola a fanatic
   and left the city, Michelangelo was touched by the friar's preaching,
   by the associated moral severity and by the hope of renovation of the
   Roman Church. In that year a marble Cupid by Michelangelo was
   treacherously sold to Cardinal Raffaele Riario as an ancient piece: the
   prelate found out that it was a fraud, but was so impressed by the
   quality of the sculpture that he invited the artist to Rome, where he
   arrived on June 26, 1496. On July 4 Michelangelo started to carve an
   over-life-size statue of the Roman wine god, Bacchus, commissioned by
   Cardinal Raffaele Riario; the work was rejected by the cardinal, and
   subsequently entered the collection of the banker Jacopo Galli, for his
   garden.
   Michelangelo's Pietà was carved in 1499, when the sculptor was 24 years
   old.
   Michelangelo's Pietà was carved in 1499, when the sculptor was 24 years
   old.

   Subsequently, in November of 1497, the French ambassador in the Holy
   See commissioned one of his most famous works, the Pietà. The
   contemporary opinion about this work — "a revelation of all the
   potentialities and force of the art of sculpture" — was summarised 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."

   The contract was stipulated in the August of the following year. Though
   he devoted himself only to sculpture, during his first stay in Rome
   Michelangelo never stopped his daily practice of drawing. In Rome,
   Michelangelo lived near the church of Santa Maria di Loreto: here,
   according to the legends, he fell in love (probably a Platonic love)
   with Vittoria Colonna, marquise of Pescara and poet. His house was
   demolished in 1874, and the remaining architectural elements saved by
   new proprietors were destroyed in 1930. Today a modern reconstruction
   of Michelangelo's house can be seen on the Gianicolo hill.

Michelangelo's David

   Michelangelo created the colossal statue of David, one of the most
   renowned works of the Renaissance.
   Michelangelo created the colossal statue of David, one of the most
   renowned works of the Renaissance.

   Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1499–1501. Things were changing in
   the city after the fall of Savonarola and the rise of the gonfaloniere
   Pier 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, David in 1504. This masterwork 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.

Under Pope Julius II in Rome: the Sistine Chapel ceiling

   Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
   Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

   In 1505 Michelangelo was invited back to Rome by the newly appointed
   Pope Julius II. He was commissioned to build the Pope's tomb, under the
   patronage of the Pope, Michelangelo had to constantly stop work on the
   tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks. Because of these
   interruptions, Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years. The tomb,
   of which the central feature is Michelangelo's statue of Moses, was
   never finished to Michelangelo's satisfaction. It is located in the
   Church of S. Pietro in Vincoli in Rome.

   The major interruption on the tomb was the commission to paint the
   ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took four years to complete ( 1508
   – 1512). According to Michelangelo's own account, reproduced in
   contemporary biographies, Bramante and Raphael convinced the Pope to
   commission Michelangelo in a medium not familiar to the artist, in
   order that he might be diverted from his preference for sculpture into
   fresco painting, and thus suffer from unfavorable comparisons with his
   rival Raphael. However, this story is discounted by modern historians
   on the grounds of contemporary evidence, and may be merely a reflection
   of the artist's own perspective.

   Michelangelo was originally commissioned to paint the 12 Apostles, but
   protested for a different and more complex scheme, representing
   Creation, the Downfall of Man and the Promise of Salvation through the
   prophets and 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
   centre 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.

   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.

Under Medici Popes in Florence

   Michelangelo's Moses.
   Michelangelo's Moses.

   In 1513 Pope Julius II died and his successor Pope Leo X, a Medici,
   commissioned Michelangelo to reconstruct the façade of the basilica of
   San Lorenzo in Florence and to adorn it with sculptures. Michelangelo
   agreed reluctantly. The three years he spent in creating drawings and
   models for the facade, as well as attempting to open a new marble
   quarry at Pietrasanta specifically for the project, were among the most
   frustrating in his career, as work was abruptly cancelled by his
   financially-strapped patrons before any real progress had been made.
   The basilica lacks a facade to this day.

   Apparently not the least embarrassed by this turnabout, the Medici
   later came back to Michelangelo with another grand proposal, this time
   for a family funerary chapel in the basilica of San Lorenzo.
   Fortunately for posterity, this project, occupying the artist for much
   of the 1520s and 1530s, was more fully realized. Though still
   incomplete, it is the best example we have of the integration of the
   artist's sculptural and architectural vision, since Michelangelo
   created both the major sculptures as well as the interior plan.
   Ironically the most prominent tombs are those of two rather obscure
   Medici who died young, a son and grandson of Lorenzo. Il Magnifico
   himself is buried in an unfinished and comparatively unimpressive tomb
   on one of the side walls of the chapel, not given a free-standing
   monument, as originally intended.
   Michelangelo's The Last Judgement. Saint Bartholomew is shown holding
   the knife of his martyrdom and his flayed skin. The face of the skin is
   recognizable as Michelangelo.
   Michelangelo's The Last Judgement. Saint Bartholomew is shown holding
   the knife of his martyrdom and his flayed skin. The face of the skin is
   recognizable as Michelangelo.

   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. Years later his body was brought back from Rome for interment
   at the Basilica di Santa Croce, fulfilling the maestro's last request
   to be buried in his beloved Tuscany.
   Michelangelo designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, although it was
   unfinished when he died.
   Michelangelo designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, although it was
   unfinished when he died.

Last works in Rome

   The fresco of The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel
   was commissioned by Pope Clement VII, who died shortly after assigning
   the commission. Paul III was instrumental in seeing that Michelangelo
   began and completed the project. Michelangelo labored on the project
   from 1534 to October 1541. The work is massive and spans the entire
   wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel. The Last Judgment is a
   depiction of the second coming of Christ and the apocalypse; where the
   souls of humanity rise and are assigned to their various fates, as
   judged by Christ, surrounded by the Saints.

   Once completed, the depictions of nakedness in the papal chapel was
   considered obscene and sacrilegious, and Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor
   Sernini ( Mantua's ambassador) campaigned to have the fresco removed or
   censored, but the Pope resisted. After Michelangelo's death, it was
   decided to obscure the genitals ("Pictura in Cappella Ap.ca
   coopriantur"). So Daniele da Volterra, an apprentice of Michelangelo,
   was commissioned to cover with perizomas (briefs) the genitals, leaving
   unaltered the complex of bodies (see details ). When the work was
   restored in 1993, the conservators chose not to remove all the
   perizomas of Daniele, leaving some of them as a historical document,
   and because some of Michelangelo’s work was previously scraped away by
   the touch-up artist's application of “decency” to the 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 a pan, as it
   remains today, and the statue of the naked child Jesus in Madonna of
   Bruges (The Church of Our Lady in Bruges, Belgium) remained covered for
   several decades.

   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's own tomb, at Basilica di Santa Croce di Firenze,
   Florence
   Michelangelo's own tomb, at Basilica di Santa Croce di Firenze,
   Florence

Michelangelo the architect

   The Capitoline Square, designed by Michelangelo during the same period,
   was located on Rome's Capitoline Hill. Its shape, more a rhomboid than
   a square, was intended to counteract the effects of perspective.

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.

Medici Chapel

   Michelangelo designed the Medici Chapel. The Medici Chapel has
   monuments in it dedicated to certain members of the Medici family.
   Michelangelo never finished it, so his pupils later completed it.
   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.

Michelangelo the man

   Michelangelo, who was often arrogant with others and constantly
   dissatisfied with himself, saw art as originating from inner
   inspiration and from culture. In contradiction to the ideas of his
   rival, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo saw nature as an enemy that had
   to be overcome. The figures that he created are forceful and dynamic;
   each in its own space apart from the outside world. For Michelangelo,
   the job of the sculptor was to free the forms that were already inside
   the stone. He believed that every stone had a sculpture within it, and
   that the work of sculpting was simply a matter of chipping away all
   that was not a part of the statue.

   Several anecdotes reveal that Michelangelo's skill, especially in
   sculpture, was greatly admired in his own time. It is said that when
   still a young apprentice, he had made a pastiche of a Roman statue ( Il
   Putto Dormiente, the sleeping child or Cupid) of such beauty and
   perfection, that it was later sold in Rome as an ancient Roman
   original. In fact, he damaged the statue and buried it in order to fool
   the buyer, Cardinal Raffaele Riario. After the truth was revealed, the
   Cardinal later took this as proof of his skill and commissioned his
   Bacchus. Another better-known anecdote claims that when finishing the
   Moses ( San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome), Michelangelo violently hit the
   knee of the statue with a hammer, shouting, "Why don't you speak to
   me?"

Relationships

   Drawing for The Libyan Sybil, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
   Drawing for The Libyan Sybil, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
   The Libyan Sybil, Sistine Chapel.
   The Libyan Sybil, Sistine Chapel.

   Fundamental to Michelangelo's art is his love of male beauty, which
   attracted him both aesthetically and emotionally. In part, this was an
   expression of the Renaissance idealization of masculinity. But in
   Michelangelo's art there is clearly a sensual response to this
   aesthetic. Such feelings caused him great anguish, and he expressed the
   struggle between Platonic ideals and carnal desire in his sculpture,
   drawing and his poetry, too, for among his other accomplishments
   Michelangelo was also a great Italian lyric poet of the 16th century.

   The sculptor's expressions of love have been characterized as both
   Neoplatonic and openly homoerotic; recent scholarship seeks an
   interpretation which respects both readings, yet is wary of drawing
   absolute conclusions. One example of the conundrum is the story of the
   sixteen year old Cecchino dei Bracci, whose death, only a year after
   their meeting in 1543, inspired the writing of forty eight funeral
   epigrams, which by some accounts allude to a relationship that was not
   only romantic but physical as well:

     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.
     or
     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.

   According to others, they represent an emotionless and elegant
   re-imagining of Platonic dialogue, whereby erotic poetry was seen as an
   expression of refined sensibilities (Indeed, it must be remembered that
   professions of love in 16th century Italy were given a far wider
   application than now). Some youths were street wise and took advantage
   of the sculptor. Febbo di Poggio, in 1532, peddled his charms — in
   answer to Michelangelo's love poem he asks for money. Earlier, Gherardo
   Perini, in 1522, had stolen from him shamelessly. Michelangelo defended
   his privacy above all. When an employee of his friend Niccolò Quaratesi
   offered his son as apprentice suggesting that he would be good even in
   bed, Michelangelo refused indignantly, suggesting Quaratesi fire the
   man.

   The greatest written expression of his love was given to Tommaso dei
   Cavalieri (c. 1509–1587), who was 23 years old when Michelangelo met
   him in 1532, at the age of 57. Cavalieri was open to the older man's
   affection: I swear to return your love. Never have I loved a man more
   than I love you, never have I wished for a friendship more than I wish
   for yours. Cavalieri remained devoted to Michelangelo till his death.

   Michelangelo dedicated to him over three hundred sonnets and madrigals,
   constituting the largest sequence of poems composed by him. Some modern
   commentators assert that the relationship was merely a Platonic
   affection, even suggesting that Michelangelo was seeking a surrogate
   son. However, their homoerotic nature was recognized in his own time,
   so that a decorous veil was drawn across them by his grand nephew,
   Michelangelo the Younger, who published an edition of the poetry in
   1623 with the gender of pronouns changed. John Addington Symonds, the
   early British homosexual activist, undid this change by translating the
   original sonnets into English and writing a two-volume biography,
   published in 1893.

   The sonnets are the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue
   addressed by one man to another, predating Shakespeare's sonnets to his
   young friend by a good fifty years.
   Ignudi, Sistine Chapel.
   Ignudi, Sistine Chapel.

          I feel as lit by fire a cold countenance
          That burns me from afar and keeps itself ice-chill;
          A strength I feel two shapely arms to fill
          Which without motion moves every balance.

                      — (Michael Sullivan, translation)

   Late in life he 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, though many scholars note the
   intellectualized or spiritual quality of this passion.

   It is impossible to know for certain whether Michelangelo had physical
   relationships ( Condivi ascribed to him a "monk-like chastity"), but
   through his poetry and visual art we may at least glimpse the arc of
   his imagination.

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