Michelangelo Buonarroti

I

Introduction

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, one of the most ambitious and influential artists of the Renaissance. Together with Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, he dominated the High Renaissance of the early 16th century, and his later work played a vital role in the development of Mannerism. His work exerted tremendous influence on his contemporaries and on subsequent Western art in general. He was also one of the greatest Italian poets of his time. Although he was accomplished in a number of different art forms, he regarded himself as primarily a sculptor in marble.

Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475, in the small village of Caprese, near Sansepolcro, but was essentially a Florentine, maintaining a deep attachment to Florence, its art, and its culture throughout his long life. He spent the greater part of his adulthood in Rome, in the employment of the popes; however, he left instructions that he be buried in Florence, and his body was placed there in the church of Santa Croce. The tomb erected there was designed by his biographer Giorgio Vasari; it features allegories of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture mourning Michelangelo’s death.

II

Early Life in Florence

Michelangelo’s father was a Florentine official named Ludovico Buonarroti, with connections to the ruling Medici family; owing to the lowly status of artists at that time, Michelangelo’s family was opposed to his artistic ambitions. However, in 1488, when Michelangelo was 13, his father placed him in the workshop of the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, where he probably learnt the art of fresco painting. After about two years, he was studying at the academy of art set up by Lorenzo de’ Medici. There he had an opportunity to converse with the younger Medici, two of whom later became popes (Leo X and Clement VII). He also became acquainted with such humanists as Marsilio Ficino and the poet Angelo Poliziano, who were frequent visitors. By the age of about 16, he was working under the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni in the sculpture garden of the Palazzo Medici, and for Lorenzo de’ Medici he began at least two relief sculptures, the Battle of the Centaurs (c. 1492, Bargello, Florence) and the Madonna of the Stairs (c. 1492, Casa Buonarroti, Florence).

His patron Lorenzo died in 1492; two years later, Michelangelo fled Florence, when the Medici were temporarily expelled following the rise of the fanatical Dominican friar Savonarola. He settled for a time in Bologna, where in 1494 and 1495 he produced three marble figures for the shrine of St Dominic in the church of San Domenico.

III

First Roman Sojourn

In 1496, after spending a few months in Florence, Michelangelo went to Rome, where he was able to examine many newly unearthed Classical statues and ruins. He soon produced his first surviving large-scale sculpture, the over-life-size marble Bacchus (1496-1497, Bargello, Florence), bought by the banker Jacopo Galli. One of the few works of pagan rather than Christian subject matter that he executed, it was considered to rival ancient statuary, the highest mark of admiration in Renaissance Rome. Michelangelo consolidated his career with the Pietà (1498-1499, St Peter’s, Rome), commissioned by the French cardinal Jean Bilhières de Lagraulas. The youthful Mary is shown seated majestically, holding the dead Christ across her lap, a theme borrowed from northern European art. Instead of revealing extreme grief, Mary is restrained, and her expression is one of resignation. In this work, one of the most highly finished of all his sculptures, Michelangelo summarized the sculptural innovations of his 15th-century predecessors while ushering in the new monumentality of the High Renaissance style of the 16th century. At the age of 25, he had already surpassed all other sculptors of the day.

IV

First Return to Florence

In 1501, Michelangelo returned to Florence, where he was based until 1505. There he produced two free-standing sculptures, the Madonna and Child (1501-1505, Notre Dame, Bruges). The major work of this period is the colossal (4.34 m/14‚ ft) marble David (1501-1504, Accademia, Florence). The Old Testament hero is depicted as a lithe, naked youth, muscular and alert, looking into the distance as if sizing up the enemy Goliath, whom he has not yet encountered. The statue, which symbolized the fortitude of the Florentine republic, originally stood in the Piazza della Signoria in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine town hall. (A copy now stands in the piazza.) The fiery intensity of David’s facial expression exemplifies the terribilità (emotional intensity) that is characteristic of many of Michelangelo’s figures and of his own personality, and the whole figure demonstrates his mastery of the male nude. A similar power of expression in the human body is also clearly seen in the figure of Christ in the Entombment (c. 1504, National Gallery, London), an unfinished tempera painting on panel.

Michelangelo’s most ambitious project of this period, the fresco of the Battle of Cascina commissioned in 1504 for the Palazzo Vecchio, was, unfortunately, never completed. However, copies of a part of the cartoon have survived, representing a tightly packed crowd of twisted, muscular nudes. The pronounced sculptural quality of Michelangelo’s painting is also apparent in the circular panel known as the Doni Tondo (1503-1504, Uffizi, Florence), in which the vigorous modelling of the figures invites comparison with actual reliefs, such as the Taddei Tondo (1505-1506, Royal Academy, London).

Between 1505 and 1508 Michelangelo divided his time between Florence, Rome, and Bologna, where he produced a bronze sculpture of Pope Julius II, destroyed by the Bolognese in 1511.