1475-1564 • Italian • Sculptor/Painter/Architect • Renaissance
"Every beauty which is seen here below by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all arecome .... The best artist has concept which some single marble does not encase within its mass." - Michelangelo Buonarroti
Michelangelo's famous saying-that the artist must find his idea locked inside the stone-has seemed to embody the essence of creative genius for almost five centuries, containing the notion that the greater the artist, the more surely he, or she, will be able to find and reveal life's hidden truths. However, Michelangelo's artistic hierarchy was quite specific: Sculpture came first, painting second. In addition, he dismissed "additive'' sculpture-achieved by MODELING a form with materials like clay-as being too much like painting.Stone was Michelangelo's medium;his wet nurse was from the town of Settignano, a village of stonecutters (see DESIDERIO and ROSSELLINO ), and he liked to say that he absorbed the love of stone cutting as an infant. As if to confirm that idea, he frequently chose to represent the Virgin Mary feeding the baby Christ. As certainly as he determined his medium, he also knew his
subject: the human body. In that "mortalveil," as he called it, he saw divine intention; and he was not loath to think himself godlike in his ability to liberate a human being from matter. Landscapes, clothing, even facial cast were insignificant in relation to the physical attitude and presence of the figures.Michelangelo both sculpted and painted; he was the first to endow the body with such expressive power. His marble David (1501-04), more than 14 feet tall, exemplifies heroic, muscular strength and beauty, while it is simultaneously a political metaphor for the Florentine Republic, which had just (although temporarily) shaken the grip of the MEDICI family. David is rarely photographed from the angle at which Michelangelo intended the statue to be seen-sideways, situated as if overlooking the city-but he clearly bears scant resemblance to his smooth-skinned, delicate-boned, bronze predecessors made by DONATELLO and VERROCCHIO. Michelangelo began his artistic training with GHIRLANDAIO, but was soon invited to live at the palace of Lorenzo de' Medici, where an informal school had been established. When Lorenzo died and Florence was in chaos, Michelangelo worked for a time in Bologna, then in Rome, where he carved the Pieta (1498-1500). After his return to Florence, where he finished David during a four-year stay, Pope Julius II called him to Rome. Known as the warrior pope, Julius was, like the ITALIAN RENAISSANCE itself, interested in both secular and religious power, and he sought both temporal and eternal glory. For the latter he commissioned Michelangelo to design and carve a tomb to rival the MAUSOLEUM OF HALICARNASSUS. After a year of work, fraught with difficulties of temperament and logistics, that project was abandoned. Had it not been stopped, Michelangelo would have spent the next 40 years on Julius's tomb. Instead, he spent 18 months on a bronze statue of the pope (subsequently destroyed and melted down), and then began work on the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. Though he was reluctant to paint, especially such a vast project-some 5,800 square feet, about feet above the floor-he designed special scaffolding for the purpose and completed the ceiling in less than four years (1508-12), entirely by himself. The theme is the Creation, Fall, and Redemption, surrounded by prophets and sibyls-hundreds of figures altogether. In the center God floats in the firmament, pointing his finger and bringing Adam forth from primeval earth to flesh and blood. Michelangelo's analogy of the sculptor creating his form is inevitable. Many of the hundreds of preliminary drawings Michelangelo made for the ceiling survive, though the CARTOONS are gone. These were laid on the fresh plaster for each day's work, in the process called BUNO FRESCO. The cleaning of this ceiling fresco, from 1985 to 1990, removing hundreds of years of grime, uncovered unexpectedly brilliant color and caused unprecedented controversy.
Critics insist a surface layer, fresco secco, was mistakenly removed, giving Michelangelo's painting an unwarranted garishness. Others believe that the colors are true, and point to how they resemble what the next generation of Mannerists would adopt (see MANNERISM). The historian Marcia Hall agrees, pointing out that he used strong color selectively, rather than uniformly, and adds that Michelangelo was "as significant a pioneer in color as he was in form, inventing here the cangiatisnzo mode." This mode is described as purposely artificial and ornamental, juxtaposing highly contrasting colors. The gulf between those for and those against the cleaning may remain unbridgeable. Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel to paint The Last Judgment from 1536 to 1541 (also cleaned, 1990-93), a morbid, turbulent scene that includes his self-portrait on the flayed skin of Saint Bartholomew. In the interim, the Medicis had returned to power, and Michelangelo designed the Medici Chapel and tomb sculptures in San Lorenzo, Florence. He proceeded with the tomb for Julius II, who died in 1513, beginning three extraordinary sculptures for it in 1513: a fierce, muscular Moses with horns (see SLUTER) and two tormented yet sensuous Slaves for which there was no room on the diminished version of the tomb that was finally dedicated in 1545. Michelangelo was caught up in the apocalyptic fervor that gripped Florence in the wake of SAVONAROLA'S sermons, and, as his poems attest, he was also tormented by turbulent, sometimes unfulfilled love affairs with young men. His close relationship with Vittoria Colonna, a Catholic reformer steeped in mysticism, began around 1536 and had a profound impact on his spiritual life. She died in 154 7, when Michelangelo was in his 70s. A melancholy, sometimes morose mood permeated Michelangelo's poetry and sculpture during his late years, and after
Colonna's death he seemed to renounce all love other than that of Christ. Failing eyesight and strength inhibited his ability to paint, yet he designed two of his most important architectural projects: the Medici family's Laurentian Library with its great, flowing stairway (begun 1524), and Saint Peter's in Rome. Saint Peter's had a long history, dating back to the 4th century, and during the Renaissance it had been redesigned by both BRAMANTE and Antonio da Sangallo (see SAN GALLO). Michelangelo simplified Bramante's design, creating a single space covered with a hemispherical DOME (completed after his death; the final plan was redesigned during the early 17th century). In contrast to LEONARDO, RAPHAEL, and CELLINI, who remained aloof from the political and religious upheavals of the era, Michelangelo felt the problems acutely and reflected them in a number of his works. He was the subject of two biographies during his lifetime, the first
by VASARI. The later, by CONDIVI, was authorized by the artist and believed to be a corrective for the first. There is, today especially, some question of the extent to which Mlichelangelo himself crafted the alternately persecuted and
persecutor reputation by which he is known. There is also a revisionist perspective that assesses him as a conscientious sand even benevolent entrepreneur, managing a community of workmen in a well-organized and well-run workshop.