Did Michelangelo belong to any important period of art?

Answer 1

Michelangelo was one of the great Italian painters and sculptors of the Renaissance . He had the Medici family as sponsors of his work and painted the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. He sculpted the statue of David located in Florence, Italy and the Pieta in St. Paul's in the Vatican. Not to mention other works of art done in his lifetime. Titian, another Renaissance painter, worked for a time with him in his workshop. Michelangelo's style and paintings are an important part of art history. His figures display the muscles and movements of real people unlike other painters before him. The figures in the Sistine Chapel seem to move and are three dimensional even though they are 70 feet overhead in a vaulted ceiling. His art shows man in contact with God, opposite of the teachings of the Church, and that man could communicate with God without the Church. This was the new thought of the Renaissance and the new growth in thinking. Once he was asked how he thought of the sculpted figures he carved and he replied " The figure is all ready in the stone. I just free it." His marble statues show muscles and movement unlike any other. The face of Mary in his Pieta displays the sadness of the death of Jesus as he lays across her lap. You can see the consternation of David as he thinks about the battle to come with slingshot in hand. There is movement in the fabric of the statue as it folds and crumbles as real fabric does in life. On his death bed , at 75, he stated " Iam still learning." Michelangelo was truly one of the world's greatest painters. If you are lucky maybe one day you can see his work. To stand under the Sistine ceiling is an experience you will never forget. It stays with you. It changes you.