Life
Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in Caprese in 1475 and died in Rome in 1564 . He was a sculptor, painter, architect and poet, he was born to a father descendent of a Florentine family of Guelph lineage who, during the birth of Michelangelo, was mayor of Chiusi and Caprese. His mother died when Michelangelo was barely 6 years old. Initiated to study under the supervision of the scholar Francesco da Urbino , Michelangelo initially exhibited creative tendencies. Encouraged by Francesco Granacci, he managed to convince his father and relatives and, in April 1488, he accepted as an apprentice in the workshop of the painters Domenico and David Ghirlandaio.
Since 1489, however, he chose to frequent the Medici gardens of San Marco, to study the ancient sculptures and current cartoons and master the skills of sculpture under the tutelage of Bertoldo di Giovanni , Donatello ‘s pupil and partner .
The drawings of the early years, copies of figures of masters of the past, such as Giotto and Masaccio , reveal in Michelangelo an extraordinary ability to orient himself critically and identify the fundamental points of the artistic tradition , welcoming its legacy and positioning himself as the most direct successor. In the gardens of San Marco he created small terracotta figures and a marble head of a faun , arousing the interest and admiration of Lorenzo the Magnificent , who welcomed him into his palace in Via Larga, where Michelangelo , taken in favor by Poliziano , came into contact with the humanists of the Medici circle, assimilating their Platonic doctrines. Between the end of 1490 and the first months of 1492 he sculpted the Madonna della Scala and the Battle of the Centaurs and the Lapiths. Upon the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he returned to his father’s house, continuing to sculpt and deepening his anatomy studies due to the dissection of cadavers that were covertly provided for him by the prior of Santo Spirito, for whom he sculpted a wooden crucifix.
Michelangelo, biography
The strong imprint produced on the artist’s psyche by Savonarola ‘s sermon also dates back to the years 1493 and 1494 . In October 1494, terrified by the disturbances that would soon lead to the collapse of the Medici, he abandoned Florence, finding sanctuary first in Venice and then in Bologna , where he resided for approximately a year with Gianfrancesco Aldrovandi. In this era he sculpted two little figures (San Procolo and San Petronio) and a kneeling Angel for the tomb of San Domenico. Returning to Florence at the end of 1495, he remained there 6 months, during which he executed a Sleeping Cupid and a Saint John . Afterwards, probably because to the paucity of commissions in the Savonarola republic, he proceeded to Rome , attaining enormous recognition in a few years with the Bacchus, sculpted for the banker Iacopo Galli, and with the Vatican Pietà, produced for the French cardinal Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas. Back in Florence in the spring of 1501, he remained there for four years, obtaining major commissions from private persons, from the lordship, from the Opera del Duomo and from the most powerful businesses : commissions which testify to the continual and extremely quick increase of his popularity.
Stylistically close to the Vatican Pietà is the severe image of the Madonna and Child of Bruges , while the Pitti tondo (the Virgin with the Child and the infant Saint John) and the Taddei tondo, sculpted some time later, reveal the interest in Leonardo’s work who, present in Florence in those years, had exhibited the cartoon of Santa Anna at the Santissima Annunziata, arousing enormous admiration.
Of the 15 statuettes for the Piccolomini altar in the cathedral of Siena, foreseen in a contract dated June 1501 , only 4 were supplied and executed largely by Baccio da Montelupo based on drawings by Michelangelo, who also left unfinished a bronze David ordered by lordship in 1502 for Marshal Pierre de Rohan. The work that most engaged the artist between August 1501 and April 1504 was the marble David , planned for Santa Maria del Fiore but put in front of the entrance to the Palazzo della Signoria. The appreciation was definitely higher than the surprise at the amazing technical talent of the artist , who was able to sketch the giant figure, without adding additional pieces, from an enormous block previously rough-hewn forty years earlier by Agostino di Duccio and then abandoned. for the portrayal of the structure and the tiniest anatomical features of the powerful body , in a position of stasis, but full of tension, ready for action, and for the dynamic characterization of the face which symbolizes the Renaissance ideal of the free man and maker of own destiny.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, summary
Another commission of enormous prestige, by the standard bearer Soderini, was that of a painting representing the Battle of Cascina for the Salone dei Cinquecento of Palazzo Vecchio. Shortly before the cartoon of the Battle of Cascina, Michelangelo had painted a tondo with the Holy Family for Agnolo Doni , in which the three vigorous figures in the foreground, linked by a chain of spiral movements, are inserted in an articulated space that anticipates motifs typical of mannerist painters. The invitation to Rome by Julius II in March 1505 and the job of creating the pontiff’s grave monument inspired the imagination of the artist who started to work with excitement, developing an architectural complex that had to rival the majesty of the ancient mausoleums. The project includes a rectangular-shaped structure with a dome-covered funeral cell. On the exterior, in the lowest order, the 4 facades were split by pillars, with figures of Slaves leaning on them, which housed niches with pictures of Victories. Higher up four enormous figures portrayed the Old and New Testaments (Moses and Saint Paul) and the Active Life and the Contemplative Life. The crowning splendor was the allegories of Heaven and Earth (or two angels) grasping an urn.
After an 8-month sojourn in Carrara for the choosing and extraction of the necessary stones, Michelangelo returned to Rome, anxious to start sculpting, but the pontiff in the meantime had chosen to have the new St. Peter’s erected according to Bramante ‘s ideas . Michelangelo left Rome the day before the commencement of the work and returned to Florence on 17 August 1506, chased in vain by papal messengers and by threatening letters urging him to return “under pain of his disgrace”. Through Giuliano da Sangallo he offered the Pope to continue to take care of the monument in Florence , where he remained for three months resuming work on the Battle of Cascina and on San Matteo, the only one begun of the 12 statues of apostles commissioned by the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore in 1503. At the end of November, following Soderini’s relentless pleadings, he visited Julius II in Bologna and made peace with him , accepting the ordination of a massive bronze figure portraying the pontiff.
The sculpture, which cost Michelangelo more than a year of labor, was erected on the front of San Petronio in February 1508, but three years later it was demolished with the return of the Bentivoglio dynasty.
The contract for the fresco decoration of the vault of the Sistine Chapel was signed in May 1508: Michelangelo, having accepted the task reluctantly, quickly became passionate about the work, expanding the program and pouring into it all the wealth of ideas and visions that they had accumulated in him since the time of the first plans for the burial of Julius II. Figures and painted architecture are linked in an ascending motion that involves the spectator , pushing his gaze beyond the gigantic figures of the Prophets and Sibyls, towards the Stories of Genesis, which together depict the events of humanity “ante legem” and the ascent of the soul to the intuition of the divine. Once the paintings were done, Michelangelo started work for the tomb of Julius II , signing, after the death of the pontiff, a second contract (May 1513), partially changing and increasing the original idea and producing, in the space of three years, two figures of Schiavi and Moses. A third contract for the monument, with a lesser project, was stated in 1516, but even then the work was not completed due to the artist’s continual engagements. The same fate befell the successor efforts of 1526 and 1532. Only the sixth edition of the monument (1542) , a chilly reflection of the ambitious adolescent ideal, committed primarily to the execution of assistance, was finished and put at San Pietro in Constraints (1545).
The works of Michelangelo
Julius II was succeeded by Leo X , Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo, tied to Buonarroti by strong connections since his infancy. From the new pope Michelangelo he acquired his first big architectural project : the completion of the façade of San Lorenzo in Florence. Michelangelo prepared the model in a short time (May-September 1517) and began to deal with the extraction of marble from the quarries of Carrara and Pietrasanta, but in March 1520, perhaps due to the difficulty of finding the funds necessary for the undertaking, the pope canceled the contract , replacing the assignment with that of transforming a chapel of San Lorenzo into a funeral chapel for the Medici. In the end Michelangelo accepted the new contract and remained in Florence despite the urging of his Roman friends to travel to Rome where the most desired positions at the papal court had remained empty upon Raphael’s death.
The official idea for the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo and the Medici tombs was accepted at the beginning of 1521 and, in 1525, the architectural organization was already accomplished in its main elements. A year previously, the execution of the sculptures for the graves of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, and Giuliano, Duke of Nemours had also began . The works for the New Sacristy were intermingled with those for the construction of a library at the monastery of San Lorenzo , for which Michelangelo had won the commission from Clement VII in December 1523. The earliest proposals were accepted, which possibly already featured a rectangular chamber and a vestibule , the execution began in August 1524.
The operations, stopped in 1526, were restarted barely 23 years later.
The following period was among the most troubled in Michelangelo’s life who, after the sack of Rome and the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, embraced the republican cause, becoming part of the “Nine of the militia” and accepting (6 April 1529 ) the office of “governor and general attorney over the construction and fortification of the city walls”. He then went to Ferrara to study the famous defensive works , received with great honor by Duke Alfonso I d’Este, for whom he painted a Leda, and, returning to Florence, he carried out a series of projects for the walls and the doors, not built due to the opposition of the standard bearer Niccolò Capponi. On 21 September, perceiving Baglioni’s treachery and not being listened to by the lordship, he fled Florence and found sanctuary in Venice , undecided whether to carry on to France. Banned by the republic, on 15 December he returned to the city besieged by imperial and papal soldiers, beginning construction on the defenses. After the city fell (12 August 1530), he had to flee to escape individual wrath, until he gained the pardon of Clement VII . He therefore resumed the abandoned work on the Medici tombs and was also compelled to accept contracts from the winners: a David-Apollo and ideas for a residence for the pontifical commissioner Baccio Valori.
The Last Judgment
Between 1532 and 1534 he sculpted a virile figure of Victoria and 4 Prisoners for the tomb of Julius II. Intolerant of the new political situation in Florence and having lost, even following the death of his father, any connection with the city, he settled in Rome in 1534 , accepting the invitation of Clement VII and the task of painting on the wall of the The Last Judgment altar in the Sistine Chapel . Upon the death of Clement VII, the commission was granted by the new Pope Paul III and the painting, completed in 1536, was uncovered on 31 October 1541 . Upsetting the traditional iconography of the theme, the artist depicted the final act of the history of humanity in an infinite space, a sky without borders, illuminated below by livid flashes, against which almost 400 figures stand out with violent contrast , grouped without order of levels and sizes, dragged into a whirlwind that overwhelms them with a whirling motion, unleashed by the terrible gesture of Christ the Judge who appears, amidst the desperation of the damned and the dismay of the saints, martyrs and blessed, in the splendor of a luminous nimbus.
With the Judgment, Michelangelo’s work seems, already in the view of contemporaries, the culminating point of the centuries-old creative heritage , but at the same time extremely subversive and polemical towards the tradition itself. The moral and intellectual certainties of the early Renaissance, the concept of man as master of his own destiny and the celebration of his indomitable energy give way to the vision of an enormous tragedy that overwhelms all humanity , painful and dismayed in the face of the inscrutable condemnation and to the sense of one’s own fragility and impotence. But the Judgment was also the work that opened the controversy between the denigrators and the exalters of Michelangelo’s work : on the one hand there were accusations of irreligion, abandonment of traditional iconography and scandalous license; on the other the exaltation of his work as the conclusion of a grandiose process and the celebration of the artist and the Florentine tradition.
Other works
Contemporary with the Judgment painting is the bust of Brutus, made for Cardinal Ridolfi , one of the Florentine exiles that Michelangelo frequented frequently in Rome. To the following decade, in addition to the definitive placement of the tomb of Julius II in San Pietro in Vincoli , for which the artist then painted the figures of Leah and Rachel, belong the frescoes of the Pauline Chapel, with the Conversion of Saul (1542- 1545) and the Martyrdom of Saint Peter (1546-1550). Over the following 20 years, Buonarroti’s interests, having reached the height of his reputation and surrounded by the adulation of the new generations of artists who aspired to replicate his works, switched towards architectural activity . In this period Michelangelo, in addition to sending instructions to Florence for the final works on the Laurentian Library, designed the prospective and monumental arrangement of Piazza del Campidoglio , the central plan reconstruction of the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (1550-1559), the transformation of the tepidarium of the Baths of Diocletian into the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli.
He then drew plans for the Sforza chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore and for Porta Pia; he continued, after the death of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1546), the building of Palazzo Farnese; and took over the management of the works for the new Vatican Basilica (from January 1547). Discarding the projects of Raphael and Sangallo, he wanted to return to Bramante’s central plan and conceived the building as a colossal plastic organism, transferring the giant order of pillars that constituted the nucleus of the internal structure to the outside and conveying it into the large dome the tension of all the members. The sculptures of recent years (the Pietà da Palestrina, the Pietà del Duomo di Firenze and the Pietà Rondanini) took up a single topic : the mourning for the dead Christ, represented in the latter two as conquering anguish in bliss at the leaving of prison ground.
Michelangelo poet
Furthermore, Michelangelo has a large collection of letters and around 300 poetic compositions , few of which predate 1520, although it is probable that his poetic activity began already in his youth, stimulated by the lessons of poets and by the fact that the artist had spent his of his artistic and spiritual formation in an environment of extraordinary cultural liveliness. Buonarroti found in literary exercise a method to fix and clarify ideas and movements of the spirit , but there is little question that only quite late, having established his own expressive measure after many trials, did he commit himself to poetry with a certain assiduity. Starting from the fourth decade of the century, the fundamental elements of his songbook were Platonic beliefs on love . The exaltation of physical beauty as a manifestation of spiritual harmony, revelation and embodiment of the divine, was complemented by the view of love not as a human link, but as a global bond.
In the rhymes of recent years, however, religious overtones have become dominating themes : visions of death and an agonized sense of sin, longing for salvation and invocations. The Rime have a significant place in sixteenth-century poetry , above all for their unique, energetic and austere tone, which shows the tension towards a more intense expressive strength.
Also very important is the correspondence which, although containing rare references to his artistic activity, allows us to deepen our knowledge of his inner world , revealing his attachment to his family unit, his devotion to his father, his impatient and troubled soul, his grumpy and suspicious solitude, generosity and an expressive vocation. Michelangelo died at the age of 88, following a short illness, on 18 February 1564 , in his residence in Macel dei Corvi, in Rome. His body, discreetly taken to Florence by his nephew Leonardo, was buried at Santa Croce .