Michelangelo

Source

• Born: 6 March 1475
• Birthplace: Caprese, Italy
• Died: 18 February 1564
• Best Known As: Master sculptor of The David

Name at birth: Michelangelo Buonarroti

Perhaps the greatest influence on western art in the last five centuries, Michelangelo was an Italian sculptor, architect, painter and poet in the period known as the High Renaissance. His great works were almost entirely in the service of the Catholic Church, and include a huge statue of the biblical hero David (over 14 feet tall) in Florence, sculpted between 1501 and 1504, and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome (commissioned by Pope Julius II), painted between 1508 and 1512. After 1519 Michelangelo was increasingly active in architecture; he designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, completed after his death. Along with contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, he is considered one of the great masters of European art.

Michelangelo's David was sculpted during almost the same years that da Vinci was painting the Mona Lisa.

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(b Caprese, ?6 March 1475; d Rome, 18 Feb 1564). Italian sculptor, painter, draughtsman and architect. The elaborate exequies held in Florence after Michelangelo's death celebrated him as the greatest practitioner of the three visual arts of sculpture, painting and architecture and as a respected poet. He is a central figure in the history of art: one of the chief creators of the Roman High Renaissance, and the supreme representative of the Florentine valuation of disegno (see DISEGNO E COLORE). As a poet and a student of anatomy, he is often cited as an example of the 'universal genius' supposedly typical of the period. His professional career lasted over 70 years, during which he participated in, and often stimulated, great stylistic changes. The characteristic most closely associated with him is terribilit?, a term indicative of heroic and awe-inspiring grandeur. Reproductions of the Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel Ceiling (Rome, Vatican) or the Moses from the tomb of Julius II (Rome, S Pietro in Vincoli) have broadcast an image of his art as one almost exclusively expressive of superhuman power. The man himself has been assimilated to this image and represented as the archetype of the brooding, irascible, lonely and tragic figure of the artist. This popular view is drastically oversimplified, except in one respect: the power and originality of his art have guaranteed his prominence as a historical figure for over 400 years since his death, even among those who have not liked the example he gave. For such different artists as Gianlorenzo Bernini, Eug?ne Delacroix and Henry Moore, he provided a touchstone of integrity and aesthetic value. Although his reputation as a poet has not been so high, his poetry has been praised by such diverse figures as William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Eugenio Montale (1896-1981).

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was the greatest sculptor of the Italian Renaissance and one of its greatest painters and architects.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, a village where his father was briefly serving as a Florentine government agent. The family, of higher rank than most from which artists came in Florence, had been bankers, but Michelangelo's grandfather had failed, and his father, too genteel for trade, lived on the income from his land and a few official appointments. Michelangelo's mother died when he was 6.

After grammar school, Michelangelo was apprenticed at the age of 13 to Domenico Ghirlandaio, the most fashionable painter in Florence. That this should have happened is surprising, and no satisfactory explanation has been proposed. Michelangelo's implication in his old age that he had to overcome his family's opposition is likely to be mythical in part. In any case, after a year his apprenticeship was broken off, and an even odder arrangement followed: the boy was given access to the collection of ancient Roman sculpture of the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici, dined with the family, and was looked after by the retired sculptor who was in charge of the collection. This arrangement was quite unprecedented at the time.

Michelangelo's earliest sculpture, a stone relief executed when he was about 17, in its composition echoes the Roman sarcophagi of the Medici collection and in its subject, the Battle of the Centaurs, a Latin poem a court poet read to him. Compared to the sarcophagi, Michelangelo's work is remarkable for the simple, solid forms and squarish proportions of the figures, which add intensity to their violent interaction.

Soon after Lorenzo died in 1492, the Medici fell from power and Michelangelo fled the city. In Bologna in 1494 he obtained a small but distinguished commission to carve the three saints needed to complete the elaborate tomb of St. Dominic in the church of S. Domenico. They too show dense forms, which contrast with the linear forms, either decorative or realistic, then dominant in sculpture, but are congruent with the work of Nicola Pisano, who had begun the tomb about 1265. On returning home Michelangelo found Florence dominated by the famous ascetic monk Savonarola. Michelangelo was in contact with the junior branch of the Medici family, and he carved a Cupid (lost) which he took to Rome to sell, palming it off as an ancient work.

Rome, 1496-1501

In Rome, Michelangelo next executed a Bacchus for the garden of ancient sculpture of a banker. This, Michelangelo's earliest surviving large-scale work, shows the god teetering, either drunk or dancing. It is his only sculpture meant to be viewed from all sides; all the others, generally set in front of walls, possess to some extent the visual character of reliefs.

In 1498, through the same banker, came Michelangelo's first important commission: the Pietà now in St. Peter's. The term pietà refers to a type of image in which Mary supports the dead Christ across her knees; Michelangelo's version is today the most famous one. In both the Pietà and the Bacchus the effects of hard polished marble and of curved yielding flesh coexist. Over life size, the Pietà has mutually reinforcing contrasts: vertical and horizontal, cloth and skin, allude to the living and the dead, female and male, but the unity of the pyramidal composition is strongly imposed.

Florence, 1501-1505

On his return to Florence in 1501 Michelangelo was recognized as the most talented sculptor of central Italy, but his work was still in the early Renaissance tradition, as is the marble David, commissioned in 1501 for Florence Cathedral but when finished, in 1504, more suitably installed in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. (The original is now in the Accademia; the statue at the original site is a copy.) It shares the clear and strong but bland presence of the Pietà. Before he finished the David, Michelangelo's style had begun to change, as indicated by his drawing of a very different bronze David (lost) and by other works, particularly the Battle of Cascina. All these works resulted from the city fathers' desire to revive monumental public art, characteristic of the period before the Medici early in the 15th century. The new Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio was to have patriotic murals that would also show the special skills of Florence's leading artists: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina was commissioned in 1504; several sketches and a copy of the cartoon exist. The central scene shows a group of muscular nudes, soldiers climbing from a river where they had been swimming, to answer a military alarm. Inevitably Michelangelo felt the influence of Leonardo and his evocation of continuous flowing motion through living forms. Michelangelo's greatness lay partly in his ability to absorb Leonardo's innovations and yet not reduce the heavy solidity and impressive dignity of his earlier work. This fusion of throbbing life with colossal grandeur henceforth was the special quality of Michelangelo's art.

From then on too Michelangelo's work consisted mainly of very large projects that he never finished because of his inability to turn down the vast commissions of his great clients which appealed to his preference for the grand scale. Of the 12 Apostles he was to execute for Florence Cathedral, he began only the St. Matthew; this was the first monumental sculpture suggesting a Leonardesque agitation.

Tomb of Julius II

The project of the Apostles was put aside when Pope Julius II called Michelangelo to Rome in 1505 to design his tomb, which was to include about 40 life-size statues. This project occupied Michelangelo off and on for the next 40 years. Of it he wrote, "I find I have lost all my youth bound to this tomb." In 1506 a dispute over funds for the tomb led Michelangelo, who had spent almost a year at the quarries in Carrara, to flee to Florence. A reconciliation between Julius II and Michelangelo took place in Bologna, which the Pope had just conquered, and Michelangelo modeled a colossal bronze statue of Julius for S. Petronio in Bologna, which he completed in 1508 (destroyed).

Sistine Chapel

In 1508 Julius commissioned Michelangelo to decorate the ceiling of the chief Vatican chapel, the Sistine. This work was relatively modest at first, and Michelangelo felt he was being pushed aside by rival claimants on funds. But he soon was able to alter the traditional format of ceiling painting, whereby only single figures could be represented, not scenes calling for dramas in space; his introduction of dramatic scenes was so successful that it set the standard for the future.

The elaborate program with hundreds of figures was arranged in an original framing system that was Michelangelo's earliest architectonic design. He approached the ceiling as a surface on which to attach planes built up in various degrees of projection, like a relief sculpture except that its basic units are blocks rather than malleable forms. The many planes and painted architectural framework make the many categories of images so easily readable that the framing system tends to pass unnoticed, but its rich, heavy ornament is typical of the High Renaissance. The chief figural elements of the program are the 12 male and female prophets (the latter known as sibyls) and the nine stories from Genesis. Michelangelo began painting at the end of the story, with the three Noah scenes and the adjacent prophets and sibyls, and in 4 years worked through the three Adam stories to the three Creation stories at the other end of the ceiling.

Michelangelo paused for some months halfway along, and when he returned to the ceiling, he made the prophets more monumental (in keeping with the fewer and hence bigger figures in the nearby Creation scenes). At that point his style also underwent a shift. He had begun with a manner reverting to his sculptural style in the Pietà and David, as if he was uncertain when facing the unfamiliar task of painting on such a scale. The first prophets are harmonious but static, as is the Flood scene. But soon there develops a forceful grandeur, with a richer emotional tension than in any previous work. This is well illustrated in the Ezekiel, whose massive torso seems to be in tension with the centrifugally twisted head and legs. The prophet peers questioningly into the unknown.

After the pause, Michelangelo began the second half of the ceiling with a newly acquired subtlety of expression, as in the Creation of Adam. The images become freer and more mobile in the last parts painted, such as the Separation of Light and Darkness, but the mood remains introspective.

As soon as the ceiling was completed in 1512, Michelangelo returned to the tomb of Julius and carved for it (1513-1514) the Moses (S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome) and two Slaves (Louvre, Paris), using the same types he employed for the prophets and their attendants painted in the Sistine ceiling. The Moses seems to represent a final synthesis of all those variants, although it is more restrained owing to the sculptural medium. It was meant to be placed above eye level, and some of its dramatic force would probably have been mitigated when seen from the intended distance. Julius's death in 1513 halted the work on his tomb.

From now on the successive popes determined Michelangelo's activity, as they were all anxious to have work by the recognized greatest maker of monuments for themselves, their families, and the Church. Pope Leo X, son of Lorenzo de' Medici, proposed a marble facade for the family parish church of S. Lorenzo in Florence, to be decorated with statues by Michelangelo, but his project was canceled after four years of quarrying and designing.

Medici Chapel

In 1520 Michelangelo was commissioned to execute a tomb chapel for two young Medici dukes. The Medici Chapel (1520-1534), an annex to S. Lorenzo, is the most nearly complete large sculptural project of Michelangelo's career. The two tombs, each with an image of the deceased and two allegorical figures, are placed against elaborately articulated walls; these six statues and a seventh on a third wall, the Madonna, are by Michelangelo's own hand. The two saints flanking the Madonna are by assistants from his clay sketches. Four river gods were planned but not executed.

The interior architecture of the Medici Chapel develops the treatment seen in the painted architectural framework of the Sistine ceiling; the walls are treated as relief sculptures, with intersecting moldings and pillars on many planes, giving a loose freedom typical of a non-professional approach to architecture. Whimsical reversals of what is proper - trapezoidal windows and capitals smaller than their columns - introduce what is now called mannerism in architecture.

The allegories on the curved lids of the tombs are also innovative: Day and Night recline on one tomb, Morning and Evening on the other. The choice of imagery was left to the artist, and these figures seem to symbolize the endless round of time leading to death. Michelangelo said that the death of the dukes cut off the light of the times of day, and such courtly adulation, which is hard to accept as Michelangelesque, is also suggested in the dukes' fancy costumes and idealized representations. Political absolutism was growing at the time, and Michelangelo's statues were often used as precedents in formulating new types of royal portraiture. A similar style is seen in the sinuous Victory overcoming a tough old warrior. This statue, Michelangelo's last serious contribution to the tomb of Julius, also embodied the artist's interest in Neoplatonism, a philosophy that urged man to rise above his body into the spiritual plane.

The architecture of the Medici Chapel has a fuller analog in the library, the Biblioteca Laurenziana, built at the same time on the opposite side of S. Lorenzo to house Leo X's books. The reading room has functional suggestions in its window and pillar system and refined ornament on floor and ceiling. But the entrance hall and staircase are Michelangelo's most astonishing illustration of capricious paradox, with recessed columns resting on scroll brackets set halfway up the wall and corners stretched open rather than sealed.

His Poetry

Most of Michelangelo's 300 surviving poems were written in the 1530s and 1540s and fall into two groups. The earlier poems are on the theme of Neoplatonic love and are full of logical contradictions and conceits, often very intricate. They belong to an international trend best known in the work of Luis de Góngora and John Donne and make an interesting parallel to mannerist architecture. The later poems are Christian; their mood is penitent; and they are written in a simple, direct style. These match a phase of Michelangelo's plastic art that slightly precedes them.

"Last Judgment"

In 1534 Michelangelo left Florence for the last time, settling in Rome. The next 10 years were mainly given over to painting for Pope Paul III, who is best known for convening the Council of Trent and thus organizing the Catholic Reformation.

The first project Michelangelo executed for Paul III is the huge Last Judgment (1536-1541) on the end wall of the Sistine Chapel. It revives a medieval approach to the same theme in using an entire end wall in an undivided field and in the composition of the parts. The design functions like a pair of scales, with some angels pushing the damned down to hell on one side and some pulling up the saved on the other side, both directed by Christ, who "conducts" with both arms; in the two top corners are the cross and other symbols of the Passion, which serve as his credentials to be judge.

The flow of movement in the Last Judgment is greater than in the medieval tradition, with the two streams of figures tending to shear against each other, but it is slower compared to Michelangelo's own earlier work. The colors, blue and brown, are simple, as are the bodies. The figure type is new, with thick, waistless torsos and loosely connected limbs. The new sobriety seems to parallel the ideas of the Counter Reformation, with whose leaders Michelangelo had intimate contact through his admired mentor, the devout widow Vittoria Colonna, the addressee of many of his poems.

Michelangelo's frescoes in the Pauline Chapel in the Vatican (1541-1545) are similar to the Last Judgment, but here he added a remarkable technical novelty by exploring perspective movement and coloristic subtlety as major expressive components. He may have turned to these typically painterly concerns because the Pauline frescoes were the first ones he executed on a normal scale and eye level. The only sculpture of these years, the Rachel and the Leah, executed so that a small amended version of the tomb of Julius could at last be erected, are so neat and unemphatic that they are often disregarded or not accepted as Michelangelo's work.

Works after 1545

Michelangelo devoted himself almost entirely to architecture and poetry after 1545. For Paul III he planned the rebuilding of the Capitol area, the Piazza del Campidoglio, a pioneering scheme of city planning that gave monumental articulation to an area traditionally used for civic ceremonies. The geometry is dynamic, marked by a trapezoidal plan (determined by the site) formed by three buildings and an oval pavement; the airy breadth of the piazza produces a relatively gentle effect of a special theatrical locus. The chief emphasis is on the facades of the two new side buildings, executed to Michelangelo's plans after his death. Two-story pilasters mark the front plane, unifying the open porch on the lower story and the closed upper one, thus mingling suggestions of compressed power and clear skeletal construction.

Michelangelo's approach to architecture was growing richer and more three-dimensional, as in the Palazzo Farnese, which he completed after the death of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger in 1546. In Michelangelo's third story of the courtyard, a second row of wide pilasters set behind the front level of narrow ones causes the wall of which they are all part to suggest a wavy continuum.

Paul III appointed Michelangelo to take over the direction of the work at St. Peter's after Sangallo died. Here Michelangelo had less respect for his predecessor's plan, returning instead to the concepts that the first architect, Donato Bramante, had proposed in 1506. The enormous church was to be an equal-armed cross in plan, concentrated on a huge central space beneath the dome surrounded by a series of secondary spaces and their containing structures. The edge thus became a complex outline of changing convex curves, and from that Michelangelo built the wall straight up, producing a very active rhythm, all on such a monumental scale that we can never see more than a fragment at one time. Its surface alternates colossal pilasters with stacks of three vertical windows compressed between them, providing a measure of the vast scale and also binding the wall into vertical unity. By the time Michelangelo died, a considerable part of St. Peter's had been built in the form in which we know it, and the drum of the dome was finished up to the springing.

The essentially three-dimensional concept of St. Peter's, inherently architectonic and original, gave way in Michelangelo's last years to a gleaming, almost dematerialized approach to the wall, suggested in the plans (ca. 1559) for the unexecuted church of S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini and a city gate, the Porta Pia (begun 1561).

Michelangelo's sculpture after 1545 was limited to two Pietàs that he executed for himself. The first one (1550-1555, unfinished), which is in the Cathedral of Florence, was meant for his own tomb. This Pietà employs the body type of the Last Judgment in the Christ and its shearing up and down thrusts in the interrelationships of the figures. His late architectural style has a parallel in his last sculpture, the Rondanini Pietà in Milan, which is cut away to an almost abstract set of curves. Michelangelo began this sculpture in 1555, and he was working on it on Feb. 12, 1564. He died six days later in Rome and was buried in Florence.

Michelangelo's impact on the younger artists who encountered his successive styles throughout his long life was immense, but it tended to be crushing. The great baroque artists of the next century, such as Peter Paul Rubens and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, were better able at a distance to study his ideas without danger to their artistic autonomy.

Further Reading

The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo was translated by Creighton Gilbert and edited by Robert N. Linscott (1963). Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo (5 vols., 1938-1960), is opinionated but indispensable; and Frederick Hartt's Michelangelo (1965), Michelangelo: The Complete Sculpture (1969), and Michelangelo Drawings (1970) are also strongly personal but more current. Both deal only with the painting, sculpture, and drawings. James S. Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo (2 vols., 1961), is outstanding for this aspect of his work. Ludwig Goldscheider, Michelangelo: Paintings, Sculptures, Architecture (4th ed. 1963), provides a reasonably complete set of good illustrations. Creighton Gilbert, Michelangelo (1967), is the most succinct survey. Still valid for biography is John Addington Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo (1893); many reprints).

For more information on Michelangelo (di Lodovico Buonarroti), visit Britannica.com.

Italian poet, painter, and sculptor of the first half of C16, he was also the most original, inventive, and influential architect of the time. His architectural career did not really start until he began work on the façade of the Chapel of Pope Leo X (1513–21), Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome (1514), followed by his connection with San Lorenzo, Florence, starting in 1516, when he prepared designs for the façade of the Church (never realized). His first actual building was the New Sacristy (1519–34), the Mortuary Chapel of the Medici, the shell of which already was built. For this interior he modelled the wall-surfaces with cornices and pediments resting on consoles without friezes or architraves, panels breaking through open-bedded segmental pediments, and other abuses of architecture. These elisions and distortions created a dynamic tension unknown in the Early Renaissance. Aedicules seem to press down on the architectural elements below, and each many-layered wall is framed by a triumphal arch (defined by pietra-serena Orders) over which the coffered dome rises on pendentives that only begin above the cornice over the great arches, with an extra storey slotted in at pendentive level. The darker pietra-serena work is conventional, resembling treatment by Brunelleschi, but Michelangelo erected the walls of white marble, seeming to crowd and break out of the areas framed by the Orders.

He was commissioned to design the Biblioteca Laurenziana (1524–71), in which pilasters seemed to carry the structure of the ceiling, the pattern of which was repeated in the design of the floor, unifying the room in a manner not previously seen. In the vestibule, columns were set in recesses and appeared to sit on consoles, while the blind aedicules in the wall-panels between the Orders were designed with shafts tapering towards the bases. The vestibule stair (completed by Ammannati after 1559) is extraordinary, with two external flights and a curious arrangement of steps. The whole structure occupies the centre of the vestibule, and was the very first grand stair of the Renaissance period to be treated as a major feature of architectural design. Both the New Sacristy and the Laurentian Library vestibule are examples of Mannerism.

In 1534 Michelangelo departed from Florence and settled in Rome, where he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling for Pope Paul III (1534–49). His Florentine architecture had been mostly interiors, with Quattrocento treatments of colour, but in Rome his architecture was public, grand, and on a huge scale. He set up the Antique statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161–80) on a new base in the centre of a space in front of the Palazzo del Senatore on the Capitoline Hill in 1539, and designed the genesis of the trapezoidal Piazza del Campidoglio as a setting for the statue, though this was not completed until the mid-C17 by the Rainaldis. He planned a new façade for the Palazzo dei Conservatori (completed 1584) which was set at an angle to that of the Palazzo del Senatore, and, to balance it, an identical façade on the other side of the Piazza that became the front of the Capitoline Museum (completed 1654). In these façades he used a Giant Order, a device that was to be widely employed thereafter, with a smaller Order carrying the first floor, and an even smaller one in the aedicules. The piazza itself was designed to look like a rectangular space, and in the centre is an elliptical pattern around the statue: both devices are read as a circle and square, and the elliptical element is the first use of this figure in Renaissance design. Both the trapezium and ellipse were precedents for the area in front of the basilica of San Pietro in Rome.

In 1546 Michelangelo was appointed to complete Sangallo's Palazzo Farnese, and he first designed the huge cornicione over the astylar façade and redesigned the upper storeys of the cortile, introducing some of his perverse Mannerist devices (such as consoles with pendent guttae that seem to have slipped down the window-architraves). In the same year Michelangelo was appointed to complete St Peter's in succession to Sangallo and Giulio Romano, and immediately began to undo some of Sangallo's work in an attempt to return to Bramante's Greek-cross plan, but in a much more powerful version. His work was largely confined to the outer and upper parts of the building, although he simplified and clarified the basic geometry. For the exterior he unified the façades with a Giant Order based on the one he had used at the Capitol and designed a sixteen-sided drum with paired columns. As built by della Porta in 1588–90 the dome is higher and more pointed, and the vertical lines of the paired columns are continued in the ribs of the dome and the lantern. Michelangelo's proposal for a giant portico was never realized, as Maderno built the nave and façade that muddied the clarity of the great architect's design.

At the Porta Pia, Rome (1561–4), named after Pope Pius IV (1559–65), Michelangelo's Mannerist tendencies became more extreme: a broken segmental scrolled pediment with swag was set inside a triangular pediment, while oversized guttae hung below blocks on either side of the tympanum; Ionic capitals, freely interpreted, became copings for the battlements; aedicules and frames around openings were deliberately oversized and blocky; and panels had broken scrolled pediments holding broken segmental pediments between them. The gate, which faces towards the city at the end of a newly straightened street leading from the Quirinal, anticipates the beginning of Baroque town-planning.

Pius IV also commissioned Michelangelo to remodel the tepidarium of the thermae of Diocletian as a church, using the ancient vaulting and eight monolithic granite columns of the Roman building. It was called Santa Maria degli Angeli, and was begun in 1561, remodelled in C18.

Bibliography

• Ackerman (1986)
• Argan & Contardi (1993)
• Heydenreich (1996)
• Lotz (1977)
• Millon & Smyth (1988)
• Placzek (ed.) (1982)
• Portoghesi (1964)
• Jane Turner (1996)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Early Life and Work

Michelangelo drew extensively as a child, and his father placed him under the tutelage of Ghirlandaio, a respected artist of the day. After one unproductive year, Michelangelo became the student of Bertoldo di Giovanni, a sculptor employed by the Medici family. From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo lived with the Medicis; during this time he learned from such philosophers as Ficino, Landino, Poliziano, and Savonarola. Although Michelangelo claimed that he was self-taught, one might perceive in his work the influence of such artists as Leonardo, Giotto, and Poliziano. He learned to paint and sculpt more by observation than by tutelage. Michelangelo was known to be extremely sensitive, and he combined an excess of energy with an excess of talent.

Sculpture

Michelangelo's earliest sculpture was made in the Medici garden near the church of San Lorenzo; his Bacchus and Sleeping Cupid both show the results of careful observation of the classical sculptures located in the garden. His later Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs and Madonna of the Stairs reflect his growing interest in his contemporaries. Throughout Michelangelo's sculpted work one finds both a sensitivity to mass and a command of unmanageable chunks of marble. His Pietà places the body of Jesus in the lap of the Virgin Mother; the artist's force and majestic style are balanced by the sadness and humility in Mary's gaze.

In 1504 he sculpted David in a classical style, giving him a perfectly proportioned body and musculature. Michelangelo's approach to the figure has been contrasted to that of Donatello, who gave David a more youthful and less muscular frame. In 1505 Michelangelo was offered a commission for the design and sculpting of the tomb of Pope Julius II. The original dimensions of the tomb were 36 × 34.5 × 23 ft (11 × 10.5 × 7 m); it would include almost 80 oversized figures. Because of various complications, the tomb was reduced drastically in size. Michelangelo made only one figure for the tomb, Moses, his last major sculpture. The artist made the statue from a block of marble deemed unmalleable by earlier sculptors; his final product conveys his own skill for demonstration of mass within stone and a sense of Moses' anguish.

Painting

Michelangelo showed mastery of the human figure in painting as well. His Doni Tondo (c.1504), a significant early work, shows both balance and energy; influence by Leonardo da Vinci is clear. When plans for the construction of the tomb of Pope Julius II were forestalled, Michelangelo left Florence.

The artist was recalled to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He placed 12 figures about the ceiling's edge; originally these figures were to represent the 12 apostles of Jesus. Finally, Michelangelo painted seven prophets and five sybils. Within the ring of prophets and sybils were nine panels on biblical world history. Three panels were devoted to the Creation, three to the story of Adam and Eve, and three to the story of Noah and the great flood. At the rear of the chapel Michelangelo painted The Last Judgment (1534), considered by many to be his masterwork. The painting depicts Christ's damnation of sinners and blessing of the virtuous, along with the resurrection of the dead and the portage of souls to hell by Charon.

Architecture

In his architectural works Michelangelo defied the conventions of his time. His Laurentian Library (c.1520), designed for the book storage purposes of Pope Leo X, was memorable for its mixture of mannerist architecture; it demonstrates Michelangelo's free approach to structural form. 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. At its center was a statue of Marcus Aurelius. From 1540 to 1550 Michelangelo redesigned St. Peter's Church in Rome, completing only the dome and four columns for its base before his death.

Bibliography

See D. Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (1981); R. S. Liebert, Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images (1983); and M. Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings (1988).

Michelangelo Buonarroti (born Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 1475–1564), Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet. Michelangelo achieved such renown in his lifetime that he was celebrated as Il Divino, the 'Divine One'. In five hundred years, his fame has scarcely diminished. Michelangelo is universally recognized as one of the greatest artists of all time. He established new and still unsurpassed standards of excellence in all fields of visual creativity—sculpture, painting, architecture—and was, in addition, an accomplished poet. Along with Dante and Shakespeare, Mozart, and Beethoven, he stands as one of the giants of Western civilization.

Michelangelo's career spanned from the final years of Lorenzo de' Medici's Florence to the first stirrings of the Counter-Reformation. He outlived thirteen popes and worked for nine of them. Although his art occasionally was criticized (he was accused of impropriety in the Last Judgment), Michelangelo's influence and reputation have always been acknowledged. Many of his works—including the Pietà, David, Moses, and the Sistine Chapel ceiling—are ubiquitous cultural icons. Despite the familiarity of Michelangelo's art, the large quantity of primary documentation (more than any previous artist), and a voluminous secondary literature, many aspects of Michelangelo's art and life remain open to interpretation.

In contrast to the romantic conception of the artist as lone genius, contemporary scholars tend to view Michelangelo in a broad historical and social context. In Italy and throughout European civilization, the family was fundamental to self-definition; a family's status established an individual's status. Michelangelo was one of just a handful of Renaissance artists, including Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Leon Battista Alberti, who were born into patrician families. It was not unreasonable, therefore, that Michelangelo's father resisted his son's artistic inclinations; the boy should have aspired to a more elevated profession, to political office, and to a socially advantageous marriage. The tension between his patrician birth and his fundamentally manual profession occasionally caused Michelangelo to experience doubt about his art (best expressed in his poetry), and to encounter conflict with his patrons.

Michelangelo's father was a distant cousin and contemporary of the great Renaissance Maecenas Lorenzo de' Medici (1449–1492). It was probably thanks to this familial relation that Michelangelo spent approximately two years in the Medici household, where he received the beginnings of a humanistic education alongside two of his future Medici patrons, Giovanni (Pope Leo X, reigned 1513–1521) and Giulio (Pope Clement VII, reigned 1523–1534). The Medici were especially important to Michelangelo's early career, providing him with commissions, opportunities, and letters of introduction that permitted the young man to pursue an untraditional course independent of the guild system and the highly competitive artisan profession. Rather, he lived on the basis of comparatively few commissions, obtained by means of skillfully navigating in a dense web of family, friendship, and patronage ties.

Appropriately for a family with social pretensions, Michelangelo was tutored by a grammarian and learned a modicum of Latin, a good hand, and how to write a proper letter. His penmanship was neat and regular, his orthography and grammar more self-consciously correct than that of many of his contemporaries. The sheer volume of Michelangelo's correspondence—more than 1,400 letters to and from the artist—distinguishes him from most artists of the early modern period. He took care in composing letters, often writing multiple drafts, and the very fact that he preserved his correspondence was characteristic of a member of the literate patrician class.

Even more important are Michelangelo's considerable labors as a poet. In the entire history of art, only William Blake has made a comparable contribution to both the poetic and visual arts. Michelangelo's poetry ranks among the greatest literary creations of the Renaissance, distinguishing him from most artists and many fellow patricians.

Michelangelo proudly declared that his family had paid taxes in Florence for three hundred years, thereby placing them among an elite group of "good families." The Buonarroti traced their citizenship back to the priorate of 1343, and in 1508 they had six members eligible for election to the Florentine government. But even more than the prestige of public office, wealth was the most certain measure of status, and property was the principal measure of wealth. Shortly after his commission to design the tomb of Pope Julius II (1505), Michelangelo began purchasing property in and around Florence. In addition to rental income, these various farm properties provided Michelangelo and his family with most of their basic needs, including grain, oil, wine, eggs, and firewood. By his death at the age of eighty-nine, Michelangelo was a millionaire; however, despite his affluence, he lived modestly, for he was, like his contemporaries, perpetually wary of gossip.

Wealth opened the door to a good marriage, which was an important means of securing longlasting social status. Of course, Michelangelo never married, but his brother Buonarroto married into the patrician Della Casa family. The children of this union also made good matches: Lionardo married into the Ridolfi family, and in 1537 Michelangelo's niece, Francesca, married Michele Guicciardini, scion of one of the oldest and most illustrious Florentine families. Michelangelo was preoccupied with the prestige and propagation of his family, which survived until the mid-nineteenth century.

Central to Michelangelo's self-perception and lifelong ambition was his firm belief that he was from a noble family who traced an ancient lineage from the famous counts of Canossa. It is scarcely important that we now doubt Michelangelo's claim; it was firmly believed by the artist and his contemporaries. His proud ancestry was affirmed in the opening lines of the biography written by his friend and pupil Ascanio Condivi: "Michelangelo Buonarroti . . . traced his origin from the counts of Canossa, noble and illustrious family of the territory of Reggio. . . ." After 1526 he stopped signing his name as "Michelangelo sculptore" and instead insisted on using his full family name, the "nome della casa."

From early in his career, Michelangelo's art was a privileged commodity made for a few select persons. Michelangelo's relations with his patrons were, for the most part, extensions of a well-established network of social bonds founded on favor, friendship, and family relations. Therefore, he was particularly sensitive about being treated like an artisan, and he adamantly denied ever running a traditional workshop (bottega): "I was never a painter or sculptor like those who run workshops," he wrote to his nephew Lionardo in 1548. Reminding Lionardo of the family's illustrious history, Michelangelo advised his young nephew that he did not provide the products and services typical of such establishments. Rather, his career is marked by a series of unique objects that are never repeated and scarcely imitable: Bacchus (1496), Pietà (1497–1499), David (1501–1504), the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508–1512), Last Judgment (1534–1541), the tomb of Julius II (1505–1545), and St. Peter's (1546–).

Like Leonardo da Vinci before him, Michelangelo attempted to maintain a life as a sort of artistcourtier where mutually beneficial and reciprocal relations blurred the distinction between artist and patron, between professional and personal obligations. In his final years, Michelangelo considered it unseemly to be paid a daily wage for his work at St. Peter's. Instead, he accepted remuneration as a favor from the pope, mostly in the form of lucrative prebends.

Michelangelo's concerns with family and lineage coincided with a pan-European preoccupation with the true nature of nobility. His desire for wealth, landed security, and social status place Michelangelo squarely in a contemporary milieu, sharing the most cherished values of his fellow citizens. At the same time, these concerns distinguish him from most of his fellow artists, few of whom could claim noble birth, a coat of arms, or even a proper family name.

Michelangelo's claim to noble birth—about which he was most adamant—is precisely the part of his biography that we treat as a fantastic delusion or myth, whereas we willingly subscribe to the literary fiction about the artist's early life and predestined rise to fame. The tale of Michelangelo's genius is a convenient means of explaining his accomplishments. Otherwise, we are left trying to understand how and why this aristocrat became an artist, and how he created his greatest works. Indeed, it is the very magnitude of those accomplishments that tends to cast his aristocratic persona in the shade. More than any previous artist, Michelangelo's success as both an artisan and aristocrat was instrumental in advancing the social status of his profession, from craftsman to genius, from artisan to gentleman. In the words of his admiring contemporary Pietro Aretino: "The world has many kings and only one Michelangelo."

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Buonarroti, Michelangelo. Il carteggio di Michelangelo. 5 vols. Edited by Giovanni Poggi, Paola Barocchi, and Renzo Ristori. Florence, 1965–1983. Critical edition of all letters to and from Michelangelo.

Condivi, Ascanio. The Life of Michelangelo. Translated by Alice Sedgwick Wohl. Edited by Hellmut Wohl. Baton Rouge, La., 1976. Important biography by Michelangelo's student.

Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists. Translated by George Bull. London and New York, 1965–1987. A selection of lives from the original work.

Secondary Sources

Ackerman, James S. The Architecture of Michelangelo. 2 vols. London, 1961. Classic survey and catalog of Michelangelo's architecture.

De Tolnay, Charles. Michelangelo. 5 vols. Princeton, 1943–1960. Comprehensive examination of the artist and his work.

Hibbard, Howard. Michelangelo. New York, 1974. Accessible and readable one-volume introduction to the artist.

Wallace, William E., ed. Michelangelo: Selected Scholarship in English. 5 vols. New York, 1995. A collection of more than one hundred articles in English on all aspects of Michelangelo's art and life.

—WILLIAM E. WALLACE

An Italian painter, sculptor, and architect of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Among many achievements in a life of nearly ninety years, Michelangelo sculpted the David and several versions of the Pietà, painted the ceiling and rear wall of the Sistine Chapel, and served as one of the architects of Saint Peter's Basilica, designing its famous dome. He is considered one of the greatest artists of all time.

Quotes:

"Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish."

"Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle."

"Genius is eternal patience."

"If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all."

"Everything hurts."

"A man paints with his brains and not with his hands."

See more famous quotes by Michelangelo