Michelangelo
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TIMELINE: The High Renaissance
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In full MICHELANGELO DI LODOVICO BUONARROTI SIMONI (b. March 6, 1475,
Caprese, Republic of Florence [Italy]--d. Feb. 18, 1564, Rome),
Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet who exerted
an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art.
[Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1994]
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``I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint.''
-- Michelangelo, quoted in Vasari's Lives of the Artists
* [LINK] David
Gigantic marble, started in 1501 and completed in 1504
Michelangelo began work on the colossal figure of David in 1501,
and by 1504 the sculpture (standing at 4.34m/14 ft 3 in tall) was
in place outside the Palazzo Vecchio. The choice of David was
supposed to reflect the power and determination of Republican
Florence and was under constant attack from supporters of the
usurped Medicis. In the 19th century the statue was moved to the
Accademia.
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Michelangelo: a dominant force in Florence and Rome
Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564) exerted enormous influence. He,
too, was universally acknowledged as a supreme artist in his own
lifetime, but again, his followers all too often present us with only
the master's outward manner, his muscularity and gigantic grandeur;
they miss the inspiration. Sebastiano del Piombo (c.1485-1547), for
example, actually used a drawing (at least a sketch) made for him by
Michelangelo for his masterwork, The Raising of Lazarus. Masterwork it
is; yet how melodramatic it appears if compared with Michelangelo's
own painting.
Michelangelo resisted the paintbrush, vowing with his characteristic
vehemence that his sole tool was the chisel. As a well-born
Florentine, a member of the minor aristocracy, he was temperamentally
resistant to coercion at any time. Only the power of the pope,
tyranical by position and by nature, forced him to the Sistine and the
reluctant achievement of the world's greatest single fresco. His
contemporaries spoke about his terribilità, which means, of course,
not so much being terrible as being awesome. There has never been a
more literally awesome artist than Michelangelo: awesome in the scope
of his imagination, awesome in his awareness of the significance--the
spiritual significance--of beauty. Beauty was to him divine, one of
the ways God communicated Himself to humanity.
Like Leonardo, Michelangelo too had a good Florentine teacher, the
delightful Domenico Ghirlandaio (c.1448-94). Later, he was to claim
that he never had a teacher, and figuratively, this is a meaningful
enough statement. However, his handling of the claw chisel does reveal
his debt to Ghirlandaio's early influence, and this is evident in the
cross-hatching of Michelangelo's drawings--a technique he undoubtedly
learned from his master. The gentle accomplishments of a work like The
Birth of John the Baptist bear not the slightest resemblance to the
huge intelligence of an early work of Michelangelo's like The Holy
Family, also known as the Doni Tondo. This is somehow not an
attractive picture with its chilly, remote beauty, but its stark power
stays in the mind when more acessible paintings have been forgotten.
* [LINK] The Holy Family with the infant St. John the Baptist (the
Doni Tondo)
c. 1503-05 (130 Kb); Tempera on panel, Diameter 120 cm (47 in);
Uffizi, Florence
The Sistine Chapel
All the same, it is the Sistine ceiling that displays Michelangelo at
the full stretch of his majesty. Recent cleaning and restoration have
exposed this astonishing work in the original vigour of its color. The
sublime forms, surging with desperate energy, tremendous with
vitality, have always been recognized as uniquely grand. Now these
splendid shapes are seen to be intensely alive in their color, indeed
shockingly so for those who liked them in their previous dim grandeur.
The story of the Creation that the ceiling spells out is far from
simple, partly because Michelangelo was an exceedingly complicated
man, partly because he dwells here on profundities of theology that
most people need to have spelt out for them, and partly because he has
balanced his biblical themes and events with giant ignudi, naked
youths of superhuman grace. They express a truth with surpassing
strength, yet we do not clearly see what this truth actually is. The
meaning of the ignudi is a personal one: it cannot be verbalized or
indeed theologized, but it is experienced with the utmost force.
* [LINK] Creation of the Sun and Moon
* [LINK] The Separation of Light from the Darkness
Detail of the Sistine Chapel, appearing over the head of the
Prophet Jeremiah
Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel from 1508
to 1512, commissioned by Pope Julius II. On becoming pope in 1503,
Julius II reasserted papal authority over the Roman barons and
successfully backed the restauration of the Medici in Florence. He
was a liberal patron of the arts, commissioning Bramante to build
St Peter's Church, Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel, and
Raphael to decorate the Vatican apartments.
(thanks to tom@tom2.webo.dg.com)
Seers and prophets
There is the same power, though in more comprehensible form, in the
great prophets and seers that sit in solemn niches below the naked
athletes. Sibyls were the oracles of Greece and Rome. One of the most
famous was the Sibyl of Cumae, who, in the Aeneid, gives guidance to
Aeneas on his journey to the underworld. Michelangelo was a
heavyweight intellectual and poet, a profoundly educated man and a man
of utmost faith; his vision of God was of a deity all ``fire and
ice'', terrible, august in His severe purity. The prophets and the
seers who are called by divine vocation to look upon the hidden
countenance of God have an appropriate largeness of spirit. They are
all persons without chitchat in them.
* [LINK] Delphes Sylphide
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City
* [LINK] Sybille de Cummes
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City
Sibyls were female seers of ancient Greece and Rome. They were
also known as oracles. Like the Jewish prophets of the Old
Testament, many sibyls had their sayings recorded in books. Jewish
prophets spoke unbidden, whereas sibyls tended to speak only if
consulted on specific questions. They sometimes answered in
riddles or rhetorical questions.
(thanks to William Arnett)
The Erythraean Sibyl leans forward, lost in her book. The artist makes
no attempt to show any of the sibyls in appropriate historical garb,
or to recall the legends told of them by the classical authors. His
interest lies in their symbolic value for humanity, proof that they
have always been the spiritual enlightened ones, removed from the sad
confusion of blind time.
The fact that the sibyls originated in a myth, and one dead to his
heart (which longed for Christian orthodoxy) only heightens the drama.
At some level we all resent the vulnerability of our condition, and if
only in image, not reality, we take deep comfort in these godlike
human figures. Some of the sibylline seers are shown as aged, bent,
alarmed by their prophetic insight.
The implicit sense of God's majesty (rather than His fatherhood) is
made explicit in the most alarming Last Judgement known to us. Is is
Michelangelo's final condemnation of a world he saw as irredeemably
corrupt, a verdict essentially heretical, though at that time is was
thought profoundly orthodox. His judging Christ is a great, vengeful
Apollo, and the power in this terrible painting comes from the
artist's tragic despairs. He paints himself into the judgement, not as
an integral person, but as a flayed skin, an empty envelope of dead
surface, drained of his personhood by artistic pressure. The only
consolation, when even the Virgin shrinks from this thunderous
colossus, is that the skin belongs to St Bartholomew, and through this
martyr's promise of salvation we understand that perhaps, though
flayed alive, the artist is miraculously saved.
As grandly impassive as the Erythraean Sibyl is the heroic Adam in The
Creation of Adam, lifting his languid hand to his Creator, indifferent
to the coming agonies of being alive.
* [LINK] The Creation of Man (Fragment of the Sistine Chapel
ceiling)
1511-12
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© 11 Jun 1996, Nicolas Pioch - Top - Up - Info
Thanks to the BMW Foundation, the WebMuseum mirrors, partners and
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