Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
known simply as Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet of the High Renaissance born in the Republic of Florence, who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. His artistic versatility 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 elder contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci. Several scholars have described Michelangelo as the greatest artist of his age and even as the greatest artist of all time.
A number of Michelangelo's works of painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence. His output in these fields was prodigious; given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. He sculpted two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, before the age of thirty. Despite holding a low opinion of painting, he also created two of the most influential frescoes in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and The Last Judgment on its alter wall. His design of the Laurentian Library pioneered Mannerist architecture.
Michelangelo was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. In fact, two biographies were published during his lifetime. One of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that Michelangelo's work transcended that of any artist living or dead, and was "supreme in not one art alone but in all three".
In his lifetime, Michelangelo was often called II Divino ("the divine one"). His contemporaries often admired his terribilità-his ability to instill a sense of awe. Attempts by subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned, highly personal style resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.
Bologna, Florence and Rome, 1492-1499
Lorenzo de' Medici's death on 8 April 1492 brought a reversal of Michelangelo's circumstances. Michelangelo left the security of the Medici court and returned to his father's house. In the following months he carved a polychrome wooden Crucifix (1493), as a gift to the prior of the Florentine church of Santo Spirito, which had allowed him to do some anatominal studies of the corpses from the church's hospital. This was the first of several instances during his career that Michelangelo studied anatomy by dissecting candavers.
Between 1493 and 1494 he bought a block of marble, and carved a larger-than-life statue of Hercules, which was sent to France and subsequently disappeared sometime in the 18th century. On 20 January1494, after heavy snowfalls, Lorenzo's heir, Piero de Medici, commissioned a snow statue, and Michelangelo again entered the court of the Medici.
In November 1497, the French ambassador to the Holy See, Cardinal Jean de Bilhères-Lagraulas, commissioned him to carve a Pietà, a sculpture showing the Virgin Mary grieving over the body of Jesus. The subject, which is not part of the Biblical narrative of the Crucifixion, was common in religious sculpture of Medieval Northern Europe and would have been very familiar to the Cardinal. The contract was agreed upon in August of the following year. Michelangelo was 24 at the time of its completion. It was soon to be regarded to the Cardinal. The contract was agreed upon in August of the following year. Michelangelo was 24 at the time of its completion. It was soon to be regarded as one of the world's great masterpieces of sculpture, "a revelation of all the potentialities and force of the art of sculpture". Contemporary opinion 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." It is now located in St Peter's Basilica.
Florence, 1499-1505
Michelangelo completed his most famous work, the statue of David, in 1504. The masterwork definitively established his prominence as a sculptor of extraordinary technical skill and strength of symbolic imagination. A team of consultants, including Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci,...
In the same period of placing the David, Michelangelo may have been involved in creating the sculptural profile on Palazzo Vecchio's facade known as the Importuno di Michelangelo. The hypothesis on Michelangelo's possible involvement in the creation of the profile is based on the strong resemblance of the latter to a profile drawn by the artist, datable to the beginning of the 16th century, now preserved in the Louvre.
Tomb of Julius II, 1505-1545
In 1505 Michelangelo was invited back to Rome by the newly elected Pope Julius II and commissioned to build the Pope's tomb, which was to include forty statues and be finished in five years. Under the patronage of the pope, Michelangelo experienced constant interruptions to his work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks. Although Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years, it was never finished to his satisfaction. It is located in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome and is most famous for the central figure of Moses, completed in 1516.
Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1505-1512
Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took approximately four years to complete (1508-1512). According to Condivi's account Bramante, who was working on the building of St. Peter's Basilica, resented Michelangelo's commission for the pope's tomb and convinced the pope to commission him in a medium with which he was unfamiliar, in order that he might fail at the task. The work is part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel that represents much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church.
Rome, 1534-1546
In Rom, Michelangelo lived near the church of Santa Maria di Lorento. It was at this time that he met the poet Vittoria Colonna, marchioness of Pescara, who was to become one of his closest friends until her death in 1547.
Shortly before his death in 1534, Pope Clement VII commissioned Michelangelo to paint a fresco of The Last Judgement on the alter wall of the Sistine Chapel. His successor, Pope Paul III, was instrumental in seeing that Michelangelo began and completed the project, which he laboured on from 1534 to October 1541. The fresco depicts the Second Coming of Christ and his judgement of the souls. Michelangelo ignored the usual artistic conventions in portraying Jesus, showing him as a massive, muscular figure, youthful, beardless and naked. He is surrounded by saints, among whom Saint Bartholomew holds a drooping flayed skin, bearing the likeness of Michelangelo. The dead rise from their graves, to be consigned either to Heaven or to Hell.
St Peter's Basilica, 1546-1564
While still working ont he Last Judgement, Michelangelo received yet another commission for the Vatican. This was for the painting of two large frescos in the Cappella Paolina depicting significant events in the lives of the two most important saints of Rome, the Conversion of Saint Paul and the Crucifixion of Saint Peter. Like the Last Judgement, these two works are complex compositions containing a great number of figures. They were completed in 1550. In the same year, Giorgio Vasari published his Vita, including a biography of Michelangelo.
Faith
Michelangelo was a devout Catholic whose faith deepened at the end of his life. His poetry includes the following closing lines from what is known as poem 285 (written in 1554);
"Neither painting nor sculpture will be able any longer to calm my soul, now turned toward that divine love that opened his arms on the cross to take us in. "
Personal Habits
Michelangelo was abstemious in his personal life, and once told his apprentice, Ascanio Condivi: "However rich I may have been I have always lived like a poor man." Condivi said he was indifferent to food and drink, eating more out of necessity than of pleasure." and that he "often slept in his clothes and ... boots.", and he was by nature a solitary and melancholy person, bizzarro e fantastico, a man who "withdrew himself from the company of men."
Relationships and Poetry
It is impossible to know for certain whether Michelangelo had physical relationships, speculation about his sexuality is rooted in his poetry. He wrote over three hundred sonnets and madrigals. The longest sequence, displaying deep romantic feeling, was written to Tommaso dei Cavalieri, who was 23 years old when Michelangelo met him in 1532, at the age of 57. These make up the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue addressed by one man to another; they predate by 50 years Shakespeare's sonnets to the fair youth:
"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. "
Figure compositions
In the two frescos of the Pauline Chapel, The Crucifixion of St. Peter and The conversion of Saul, Michelangelo has used the various groups of figures to convey a complex narrative. In the Crucifixion of Peter soldiers busy themselves about their assigned duty of digging a post hole and raising the cross while various people look on and discuss the events. A group of horrified women cluster in the foreground, while another group of Christians is led by a tall man to witness the events. In the right foreground, Michelangelo walks out of the painting with an expression of disillusionment.
Legacy
Michelangelo, with Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, is one of the three giants of the Florentine High Renaissance. Although their names are often cited together, Michelangelo was younger than Leonardo by 23 years, and older than Raphael by eight. Because of his reclusive nature, he had little to do with either artist and outlived both of them by more than forty years.
While Michelangelo's David is the most famous male nude of all time and now graces cities around the world, some of his other works have had perhaps even greater impact on the course of art. The twisting forms and tensions of the Victory, the Bruges Madonna and the Medici Madonna make them the heralds of the Mannerist art. The unfinished giants for the tomb of Pope Julius II had profound effect on late-19th and 20th-century sculptors such as Rodin and Henry Moore.
The Sistine Chapel ceiling was a work of unprecedented grandeur, both for its architectonic forms, to be imitated by many Baroque ceiling painters, and also for the wealth of its inventiveness in the study of figures. Vasari wrote:
The work has proved a veritable beacon to our art, of inestimable benefit to all painters, restoring light to a world that for centuries had been plunged into darkness. Indeed, painters no longer need to seek for new inventions, novel attitudes, clothed figures, fresh ways of expression, different arrangements, or sublime subjects, for this work contains every perfection possible under those headings.
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