Michelangelo

I

Introduction

Michelangelo (1475-1564), Italian painter, sculptor, architect, and poet whose artistic accomplishments exerted a tremendous influence on his contemporaries and on subsequent European art. Michelangelo considered the male nude to be the foremost subject in art, and he explored its range of movement and expression in every medium. Even his architecture has a human aspect to it, in which a door, window, or support may refer to the face or body, or the position of architectural elements may suggest muscular tension.

Michelangelo continually sought challenge, whether physical, artistic, or intellectual. He favored media that required hard physical labor—marble carving and fresco painting. In painting figures, he chose poses that were especially difficult to draw. And he gave his works several layers of meaning, by including multiple references to mythology, religion, and other subjects. His success in conquering the difficulties he set for himself is remarkable, but he left many of his works unfinished, as if he were defeated by his own ambition.

II

Early Influences

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in the small village of Caprese and grew up in Florence. Florence was the artistic center of the early Renaissance, a period of outstanding artistic innovation and accomplishment that began in the early 1400s. In many ways the masterpieces that surrounded Michelangelo were his best teachers—ancient Greek and Roman statuary, and the paintings, sculpture, and architecture of early Renaissance masters Masaccio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia, and Filippo Brunelleschi. As a child he preferred drawing to his schoolwork, despite his father's stern disapproval.

Eventually his father relented and allowed 13-year old Michelangelo to be apprenticed to Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. Michelangelo's time in Ghirlandaio's workshop was marked with conflict, and his training there ended after only a year. Although he later denied that Ghirlandaio had any influence on him, he surely learned the technique of fresco painting from him, and his early drawings show some evidence of drawing methods used by Ghirlandaio.

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From 1490 to 1492 Michelangelo lived in the house of Lorenzo de' Medici (known as Lorenzo the Magnificent), then the leading art patron of Florence. The Medici household was a gathering place for artists, philosophers, and poets. During this time Michelangelo met and perhaps studied with Bertoldo di Giovanni, an aging master who had trained with Donatello, the greatest sculptor of 15th-century Florence. Other members of the Medici circle inspired in Michelangelo a love of literature that he would develop in his poetry (a significant, if less-accomplished art form for him). They also taught him the ideas of Neoplatonism—a philosophy that regards the body as a trap for a soul that longs to return to God. Scholars interpret many of Michelangelo's works in terms of these ideas, in particular, his human figures that appear to break free from the stone that imprisons them.

Lorenzo de’ Medici wished to revive the art of sculpture in the classical manner of the ancient Greeks and Romans (see Classic, Classical, and Classicism), and he had a collection of ancient art that Michelangelo doubtless studied. Classical art provided an inspiration and a standard of excellence that Michelangelo hoped to surpass. Some of his earliest sculptures imitated classical works so closely that they were passed off as Roman originals. Later, Michelangelo was on hand in Rome for the excavation of a massive ancient sculpture of Laocoön (probably a Roman copy of a Greek original from the 2nd century bc, Vatican Museums, Vatican City). This powerful grouping of the Trojan prince Laocoön and his two sons, as they struggle to free themselves from huge snakes, provided a model of tense and twisting bodies that Michelangelo used in many of his late works, including the Last Judgment (1536-1541, Sistine Chapel, Vatican City).

Michelangelo was a very religious man, but he expressed his personal beliefs most clearly in his late works. His late drawings are introspective meditations on Christian themes such as the crucifixion, and in some works he inserted his own image as an onlooker in a religious scene.

Throughout his career Michelangelo came in contact with learned and powerful men. His patrons were wealthy businessmen, civic leaders, and church officials, including popes Julius II, Clement VII (born Giulio de’ Medici, nephew of Lorenzo), and Paul III. Michelangelo strove to be accepted among his patrons as a gentleman, producing a large body of poetry and constructing a myth of noble ancestry. At the same time, he seemed to take pride in the physical work of making art. For example, he preferred the dirty and exhausting art of marble carving to that of panel painting, which he saw as something one could do in fine clothing. This is one of many contradictions in his life, but it is also an indication of the changing status of the artist—from craftsman to genius—that Michelangelo himself helped to bring about.

III

Early Works

After political events led to the expulsion of the powerful Medici family from Florence in 1494, Michelangelo traveled to Venice, Bologna, and finally to Rome. He produced his first large-scale sculpture in Rome, a larger-than-life-size figure of a drunken Bacchus (1496-1498, Museo Nazionale, Bargello, Florence), the Roman god of wine. This sensual, nude youth is one of his few works of pagan rather than Christian subject matter and was based on ancient Greek and Roman statuary.

A

Pietà

One of Michelangelo’s most memorable early works is a Pietà (1497-1500, Saint Peter's Basilica, Vatican City). The Pietà theme shows Christ in his mother’s lap, just after he is taken down from the cross. The theme was popular in France and northern Europe. But the two figures typically appeared awkward in northern art, with the body of a grown man lying stiffly across the lap of a much smaller woman, and with the wounds of Christ exaggerated to elicit a strong emotional response from the viewer. In contrast, Michelangelo's version shows Mary grieving silently and makes Christ’s wounds barely visible. For intense emotionalism, Michelangelo substituted restrained but eloquent gestures—the Virgin calls our attention to her dead son with her left hand, while her right arm embraces him gently, lifting his arm slightly so that it hangs lifelessly before us. Mary's full robe forms a broad base for Christ's limp body, which curves slightly to wrap around hers, making the group graceful and compact.

Michelangelo originally intended for the piece to be placed within a shallow niche, and accordingly, he polished to a smooth finish all the surfaces that would have been visible and gave meticulous care to the drapery. This high degree of finish is rarely present in Michelangelo's work, and so probably reflects the tastes of the patron, a French cardinal who had commissioned the sculpture to be placed on his tomb. Michelangelo returned to the theme of the Pietà late in his life, in two of his most personal expressions: the Florentine Pietà (1547?-1555, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence), which he meant to have placed on his own tomb, and the Rondanini Pietà (1555-1564, Castello Sforzesco, Milan), a work that remained unfinished when he died.

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