Operele lui Michelangelo

 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

                                      

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