Michelangelo

Italian artist

• Born: March 6, 1475
• Birthplace: Caprese, Tuscany, Republic of Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: February 18, 1564
• Place of death: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)

Michelangelo excelled in sculpture, painting, architecture, and poetry. He was the supreme master in representing the human body, especially the male nude, and his idealized and expressive treatment of this theme was enormously influential, both in his own day and in subsequent centuries.

Early Life

Michelangelo (mee-kuh-LAHN-juh-loh) was the second of five sons of an aristocratic but impoverished Florentine family. He was born in the village of Caprese, near Arezzo, where his father was serving as magistrate, but before he was a month old the family returned to Florence.

From childhood Michelangelo was strongly drawn to the arts, but this inclination was bitterly opposed by his father, who considered artistic activity menial and hence demeaning to the family social status. The boy’s determination prevailed, however, and at the age of thirteen, he was apprenticed to the popular painter Ghirlandajo. From Ghirlandajo he presumably learned the technique of fresco painting, but his style was formed on the study of the pioneers of Renaissance painting, Giotto and Masaccio. It was while copying a Masaccio fresco that he was punched in the face by another apprentice. The resulting broken nose gave his face its distinctive bent profile for the rest of his life.

About a year after entering his apprenticeship, Michelangelo’s precocious talent attracted the notice of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the unofficial ruler and leading art patron of Florence, and the boy was invited to join the Medici household. There he had the opportunity to study both classical and modern masterpieces of sculpture and to absorb the Humanistic culture and Neoplatonic philosophy that pervaded the Medici court. From this period date Michelangelo’s two earliest surviving works, both reliefs, The Battle of the Centaurs (c. 1492) and The Madonna of the Steps (c. 1492). When Lorenzo died in 1492, Michelangelo left the Medici palace and undertook the study of anatomy based on the dissection of corpses from the Hospital of Santo Spirito, for which he carved a wooden crucifix in gratitude.

In 1494, the populace of Florence, stirred by the puritanical monk Girolamo Savonarola, ousted the Medici family and reestablished a republic. Michelangelo, although he seems to have admired Savonarola and supported the republic, evidently felt threatened because of his close ties to the Medici family and fled the city, staying briefly in Venice and then in Bologna. There he supported himself with relatively minor sculpture commissions.

The year 1496 found him in Rome, where he undertook two important projects, the Bacchus (1497), which effectively replicated the Hellenistic style, and the Vatican Pietà (1499), an image of the Virgin Mary supporting the dead Christ. In this work Michelangelo minimizes the painful aspect of the subject by showing the Virgin as a lovely, surprisingly youthful woman gazing down serenely at the classically beautiful body of her son. To overcome the awkwardness of balancing an adult male body on the lap of a woman, he enlarges the Virgin but masks her size with billowing drapery and wraps the body of Christ around her to create a compact, pyramidal group. The contract called for the Pietà to be “the most beautiful work in marble which exists today in Rome.” When Michelangelo completed the piece, there was no question that he had met this requirement.

Life’s Work

In 1501, Michelangelo returned triumphantly to Florence and to a new challenge. An enormous marble block was assigned to him. It had been abandoned decades earlier because its tall, shallow proportions seemed unsuitable for a figure sculpture. From it he carved the David (1501–1504). David was a favorite Florentine subject, but Michelangelo’s treatment broke with tradition in representing the shepherd boy as a Herculean nude, twice life-size, before, rather than after, the battle so as to incorporate greater physical and psychic tension. The statue was placed in the square outside the governmental palace, but it has since been moved inside to protect it from the weather.

Contemporary with the David or slightly later are several powerful representations of the Madonna and Child, including the artist’s only unquestioned panel painting, the Doni Madonna (c. 1503–1505).

In 1504, the Florentine republic ordered two large battle scenes for its council chamber, one from Leonardo da Vinci and the other from Michelangelo. Neither fresco was actually painted, and even Michelangelo’s preliminary drawing survives only in a copy. It shows a group of bathing soldiers struggling out of a stream at the battle alarm, and the treatment of the straining, foreshortened bodies was to provide instruction and inspiration to a whole generation of Italian artists.

This painting and a series of sculpted apostles for Florence Cathedral were interrupted when the newly elected pope, Julius II , called Michelangelo to Rome. The pope’s first commission was for his tomb, a grandiose, multilevel structure that was to include more than forty figures. Michelangelo had hardly begun this project when the pope changed his mind and ordered the artist instead to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel . Michelangelo vigorously objected that he was a sculptor, not a painter, but in the end he spent the years 1508–1512 on the work, covering the surface—approximately fifty-eight hundred square feet, seventy feet above the floor—with scenes from Genesis, enframed by nude youths and surrounded by enthroned prophets and Sibyls. In keeping with his preference for sculpture, emphasis is placed on the monumental figures with rather minimal background. Nevertheless, as cleaning of the fresco has revealed, the coloring is both subtle and brilliant.

On completion of the ceiling, Michelangelo resumed his work on the pope’s tomb, producing The Dying Slave (1513–1516), The Rebellious Slave (1513–1516), and Moses (1505–1545). Julius, however, died in 1513, and his successors would include two members of the Medici family, both boyhood companions of Michelangelo, Leo X (1513–1521) and Clement VII (1523–1534). Both preferred to keep Michelangelo employed largely on family projects in Florence, so that progress on the Julius tomb was slow and sporadic. The first Medician commission, an elaborate facade for the family church of San Lorenzo, was never executed, but the next, a new sacristry in the same church containing tombs of the Medici dukes, although never finished, was to be the artist’s most complete architectural and sculptural ensemble. Probably the most celebrated figures from this complex are the personifications of Night and Day , Dawn, and Dusk (1520–1534), which recline uneasily on the curved and sloping sarcophagus lids. Above them sit idealized effigies of the dead dukes, who turn toward a statue of the Madonna and Child, the so-called Medici Madonna (1525). There is a noticeable change in Michelangelo’s style in the 1520’s, the decade of this chapel. His figures become more restless, with spiraling rhythms and sometimes elongated or otherwise distorted proportions, the overall effect of which is disturbing.

The same quality is found in the architecture that Michelangelo executed in the same decade, especially the vestibule of the Medicean-Laurentian Library, which includes a number of unconventional and even bizarre features. This change corresponds to a more general anticlassical and antinaturalistic trend in Italian art at this time that is often characterized as mannerism. When, in 1527, the Florentines again expelled their Medici rulers and restored the republic, Michelangelo sided against his patrons and supported it. During the ensuing conflict, he played a major role in designing the fortifications of the city, and when Medici forces recaptured it in 1530, he went into hiding. Pope Clement amnestied the artist, but Michelangelo felt threatened and estranged under the new autocratic regime and spent increasing amounts of time in Rome. Finally, in 1534, he left Florence forever. Two days after he arrived to settle in Rome, Clement VII died.

Michelangelo expected now to be free to return to the long-delayed and repeatedly scaled down Julius tomb, but again he was frustrated. The new pope, Paul III, declaring that he had waited thirty years to have Michelangelo work for him, induced Julius’s heirs to accept a modest wall tomb featuring Moses, from the original project, and two more female figures from Michelangelo’s hand. The monument was completed in 1545, and Michelangelo was at last free of what he himself described as “the tragedy of the tomb.”

Meanwhile, he was engaged on several major projects for Pope Paul III, beginning with the fresco of The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, painted between 1536 and 1541. The expressionist tendency in Michelangelo’s art, already noted, is dominant here. Clusters of swirling figures alternate with empty sky, and the scale of the figures changes unaccountably, with the more distant becoming larger. A poignant personal note is the inclusion of a grimacing self-portrait of the artist on the discarded skin of one of the saints.

The Last Judgment was followed by two more frescoes painted during the 1540’s for Paul III’s private chapel, The Conversion of Saint Paul (1542–1545) and The Crucifixion of Saint Peter (1542–1550). The pope also placed Michelangelo in charge of several architectural projects, including the rebuilding of the cupola at St. Peter’s Basilica and the remodeling of the Piazza del Campidoglio. Neither, however, was to be completed in the artist’s lifetime.

In his last years, Michelangelo returned to sculpture with two devotional and deeply personal works. The Florence Pietà (1550-1556) was intended for Michelangelo’s own tomb and contained his self-portrait. In 1555, however, he attacked and damaged the piece in a fit of frustration. Thereafter he sculpted the Rondanini Pietà (1552–1564), on which he was still working six days before his death, in 1564, when he was eighty-eight.

Significance

Michelangelo gave eloquent expression, in sculpture, painting, and poetry, to his own ideals and those of his contemporaries as they moved from the confident Humanism of the High Renaissance to the anxious spirituality of the Counter-Reformation period. His early work seems to harmonize the pagan sensuality of antiquity with Christian themes and to celebrate human beauty as a reflection of divine creation. As his art and thought evolved, however, he increasingly conveyed a tension between spirit and body, form and matter, and he came to depreciate physical perfection in favor of psychological and spiritual expression. In his late Roman years, he became associated with the Catholic reform movement, and his growing religious fervor gives a highly personal and sometimes mystical flavor to the art of this period.

Michelangelo’s genius was recognized and venerated by his contemporaries, and he exerted enormous influence on generations of younger artists. It was, however, the superficial aspects of his style, such as serpentine poses and muscular anatomies, that were easiest to assimilate. None of his followers was able to match his profundity of thought and feeling.

Bibliography

Condivi, Ascanio. The Life of Michelangelo. Edited with an introduction by Hellmut Wohl. Translated by Alice Sedgwick Wohl. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. An essential primary source, this biography was written during Michelangelo’s lifetime by one of his students and is based on the artist’s own recollections. Illustrations and bibliography.

De Tolnay, Charles. Michelangelo. 5 vols. 2d ed., rev. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969-1971. The definitive scholarly study of the artist in five volumes, each devoted to a particular aspect of his life or work. Catalog of works, extensive notes, illustrations, and bibliography.

Gill, Anton. Il Gigante: Michelangelo, Florence, and the David, 1492-1504. New York: T. Dunne Books, 2003. Study focuses on the twelve years between the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici and the unveiling of Michelangelo’s most famous statue. The author claims that these twelve years are the most dramatic, not just in Michelangelo’s life, but in Florentine history as well. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, map, bibliographic references, and index.

Goffen, Rona. Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. A study of the importance of artistic rivalry to both the great artists of the Renaissance and their patrons. Looks at many primary documents of the period, including letters, contracts, and treatises. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Hartt, Frederick. Michelangelo. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1965. Limited to Michelangelo’s paintings, which are dealt with in an introductory essay, followed by color plates with interpretive comments. Biographical chronology and bibliography.

Hartt, Frederick. Michelangelo, the Complete Sculpture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1969. Contains lavish illustrations, many in color, with fine interpretive text geared to plates. Includes biographical chronology and bibliography.

Hibbard, Howard. Michelangelo. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harper & Row, 1985. A highly readable, unobtrusively scholarly survey of Michelangelo’s life and career. Illustrations and bibliography.

King, Ross. Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling. London: Chatto & Windus, 2002. Extremely detailed narrative of the creation of the Sistine Chapel fresco, from the political intrigues behind Michelangelo’s receipt of the commission through its completion. Details both the artist’s daily life and rivalries of the period, and the technical details of the creation itself, as well as emphasizing the importance of Michelangelo’s work to the history of art. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, and index.

Murray, Linda. Michelangelo: His Life, Work, and Times. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984. Focus on the artist’s historical setting, with extended quotes from contemporary sources. Numerous illustrations relate both to Michelangelo’s works and to his background. Bibliography.

Vasari, Giorgio. “Michelangelo.” In Lives of the Artists, translated by George Bull. New York: Penguin Books, 1965. A major primary source, this biography by a friend and fellow artist was written shortly after Michelangelo’s death and includes firsthand impressions and recollections.