Italian Renaissance: Michelangelo Buonarroti

Masterpieces of Michelangelo Buonarroti

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, commonly known as Michelangelo, (March 6, 1475 – February 18, 1564) was a Renaissance artist and poet.

Michelangelo Buonarroti Michelangelo is famous for creating the fresco ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as well as the Last Judgment over the altar, and The Martyrdom of St. Peter and The Conversion of St. Paul in the Vatican's Cappella Paolina; among his many sculptures are those of David and the Pietà, as well as the Doni Virgin, Bacchus, Moses, Rachel, Leah, and members of the Medici family; he also designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica.

Michelangelo's Life History
Michelangelo was born near Arezzo, in Caprese, Tuscany, Italy in 1475. His father, Lodovico di Leonardo di Buonarotti di Simoni, was the resident magistrate in Caprese and podestà of Chiusi. His mother was Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena. As genealogies of the day indicated that the Buonarroti descended from Countess Matilda of Tuscany, the family was considered minor nobility. However, Michelangelo was raised in Florence and later lived with a sculptor and his wife in the town of Settignano where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm. Michelangelo once said to the biographer of artists Giorgio Vasari, "What good I have comes from the pure air of your native Arezzo, and also because I sucked in chisels and hammers with my mother's milk."

Overview
Michelangelo stayed in several places in Italy during his lifetime including several periods staying in Florence, Bologna and Rome:

Florence (until 1494)
Venice and Bologna (1494–1496)
Rome (arrives 25 June 1496, stays until 1501) contract for Pieta in St Peters
Florence (1501–1505) marble David, twelve apostles
Rome (1505–1506) — Commissioned to execute Pope Julius II's tomb
Florence (secretly returned to Florence in 1506)
Bologna (1506–1509) — Summoned by Pope to make a bronze statue of him
Rome (1508–1516) — Sistine Chapel ceiling
Florence (1516–1532)
Rome (1532–1534)
Florence (1534) — Last stay in Florence
Rome (1534–1564) — Last Judgement, completion of Julius' tomb, designed dome for St Peter's.

Early life in Florence
Against his father's wishes (in fact to persuade him to take up a more honorable profession, his father would beat him), after a period of grammatics studies with the humanist Francesco d'Urbino Michelangelo chose to continue his apprenticeship in painting with Domenico Ghirlandaio and in sculpture with Bertoldo di Giovanni: on June 28, 1488 he signed with an already famous painter a contract for three years starting in 1488. Amazingly enough, Michelangelo's father was able to get Ghirlandaio to pay the young artist, which was unheard of at the time. In fact, most apprentices paid their masters for the education. Impressed, Domenico recommended him to the ruler of the city, Lorenzo de' Medici, and Michelangelo left his workshop in 1489. From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo attended Lorenzo's school and was influenced by many prominent people who modified and expanded his ideas on art, following the dominant Platonic view of that age, and even his feelings about sexuality. It was during this period that Michelangelo met literary personalities like Pico della Mirandola, Angelo Poliziano and Marsilio Ficino.

Madonna of the Steps (1490–1492) and Battle of the Centaurs (1491–1492). The latter was based on a theme suggested by Poliziano and was commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici.

After the death of Lorenzo on April 8, 1492, for whom Michelangelo had become a kind of son, Michelangelo quit the Medici court. In the following months he produced a Wooden crucifix (1493), as a thanksgiving gift to the prior of the church of Santa Maria del Santo Spirito who had permitted him some studies of anatomy on the corpses of the church's Hospital. Between 1493 and 1494 he bought the marble for a larger than life statue of Hercules, which was sent to France and disappeared sometime in the 1700s. He could enter again the court after on January 20, 1494, Piero de Medici commissioned a snow statue from him. But that year the Medici were expelled from Florence after the Savonarola rise, and Michelangelo also left the city before the end of the political upheaval, moving to Venice and then to Bologna. He did stay in Florence for awhile hiding in a small room underneath San Lorenzo that can still be visited to this day, if you know how to ask the guides. In this room there are charcoal sketches still on the walls of various images that Michelangelo drew from his memory.

Here he was commissioned to finish the carving of the last small figures of the tomb and shrine of St. Dominic, in the church with the same name. He returned to Florence at the end of 1494, but soon he fled again, scared by the turmoils and by the menace of the French invasion.

He was again in his city between the end of 1495 and the June of 1496: if Leonardo considered Savonarola a fanatic and left the city, Michelangelo was touched by the friar's preaching, by the associated moral severity and by the hope of renovation of the Roman Church. In that year a marble Cupid by Michelangelo was treacherously sold to Cardinal Raffaele Riario as an ancient piece: the prelate discovered the cheat, but was so impressed by the quality of the sculpture that he invited the artist to Rome, where he arrived on June 26, 1496. On July 4 Michelangelo started to carve an over-life-size statue of the Roman god of wine, Bacchus, commissioned by the banker Jacopo Galli for his garden.

Subsequently, in November of 1497, French ambassador in the Holy See commissioned one of his most famous works, the Pietà. The contract was stipulated in the August of the following year. Though he devoted himself only to sculpture, during his first stay in Rome Michelangelo never stopped his daily practice of drawing.

In Rome Michelangelo lived near the church of Santa Maria di Loreto: here, according to the legends, he fell in love (probably a Platonic love) with Vittoria Colonna, marquise of Pescara and poet. His house was demolished in 1874, and the remaining architectural elements saved by new proprietors were destroyed in 1930. Today a modern reconstruction of Michelangelo's house can be seen on the Gianicolo hill.

Under Pope Julius II in Rome: Sistine ceiling

Michelangelo was summoned back to the great city of Rome (in 1503) by the newly appointed Pope Julius II and was commissioned to build the Pope's tomb. However, under the patronage of Julius II, Michelangelo had to constantly stop work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks. In fact Julius II had a new job for him: painting twelve figures of apostles and some decorations on the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel which took four years to complete (1508–1512). The request of the Pope is believed to have something to do with an attempt to damage the reputation of Michelangelo by Raphael because Michelangelo was his open rival, and because he had never painted frescos before he thought he would make him fail. However the painting became one of the most famous of his monumental paintings. Due to those and later interruptions, Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years without ever finishing it.

Michelangelo was employed to paint only the 12 Apostles, but when the work was completed there were more than 300 figures from the bible. His figures showed the creation, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the Great Flood. On the lowest part of the Sistine ceiling he painted the ancestors of Christ. Above this he alternated male and female prophets, with Jonah over the altar. On the highest section Michelangelo painted nine stories from the Book of Genesis. To be able to reach the chapel's ceiling, Michelangelo designed his own scaffold; a flat wooden platform on brackets built out from holes in the wall, high up near the top of the windows. He stood on this scaffolding while he painted. When the first layer of plaster began to grow mold because it was too wet, Michelangelo had to remove it and start again. He then tried a new mixture of plaster, called intonaco, created by one of his assistants, Jacopo l'Indaco. This one not only resisted mold, but also entered the Italian building tradition (and is still now in use). Michelangelo used bright colors, easily visible from the floor.

Under Medici Popes in Florence

In 1513 Pope Julius II died and his successor Pope Leo X, a Medici, commissioned Michelangelo to reconstruct the façade of the basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence and to adorn it with sculptures. Michelangelo agreed reluctantly. The three years he spent in creating drawings and models for the facade, as well as attempting to open a new marble quarry at Pietrasanta specifically for the project, were among the most frustrating in his career, as work was abruptly cancelled by his financially-strapped patrons before any real progress had been made.

Apparently not the least embarrassed by this turnabout, the Medici later came back to Michelangelo with another grand proposal, this time for a family funerary chapel in the basilica of San Lorenzo. Fortunately for posterity, this project, occupying the artist for much of the 1520s and 1530s, was more fully realized. Though still incomplete, it is the best example we have of the integration of the artist's sculptural and architectural vision, since Michelangelo created both the major sculptures as well as the interior plan. Ironically the most prominent tombs are those of two rather obscure Medici who died young, a son and grandson of Lorenzo. Il Magnifico himself is buried in an obscure corner of the chapel, not given a free-standing monument, as originally intended.

In 1527, the Florentine citizens, encouraged by the sack of Rome, threw out the Medici and restored the republic. A siege of the city ensued, and Michelangelo went to the aid of his beloved Florence by working on the city's fortifications from 1528 to 1529. The city fell in 1530 and the Medici were restored to power. Completely out of sympathy with the repressive reign of the ducal Medici, Michelangelo left Florence for good in the mid-1530s, leaving assistants to complete the Medici chapel. Years later his body was brought back from Rome for interment, fulfilling the maestro's last request to be buried in his beloved Tuscany.

Later works in Rome

The fresco of The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel was commissioned by Pope Paul III, and Michelangelo labored on the project from 1534 to October 1541. Once completed, the depictions of nakedness in the papal chapel was considered obscene and sacrilegeous, and Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini (Mantua's ambassador) campaigned to have the fresco removed or censored, but the Pope resisted. After Michelangelo's death, it was decided to obscure the genitals ("Pictura in Cappella Ap.ca coopriantur"). So Daniele da Volterra, an apprentice of Michelangelo, covered with sort of perizomas (briefs) the genitals, leaving unaltered the complex of bodies (see details[1]). When the work was restored in 1993, the restorers chose not to remove the perizomas of Daniele; however, a faithful uncensored copy of the original, by Marcello Venusti, is now in Naples, at the Capodimonte Museum.

Censorship always followed Michelangelo, once described as "inventor delle porcherie" (inventor of obscenities, in a sense that in Italian sounds like he had created genitals). The "fig-leaf campaign" of the Counter-Reformation to cover all representations of human genitals in paintings and sculptures started with Michelangelo's works. To give two examples, the bronze [actually, marble] statue of Cristo della Minerva (church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome) was covered, as it remains today, and the statue of the naked child Jesus in Madonna of Bruges (The Church of Our Lady in Bruges, Belgium) remained covered for several decades.

In 1546, Michelangelo was appointed architect of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, and designed its dome. As St. Peter's was progressing there was concern that Michelangelo would pass away before the dome was finished. Once they started building the lower part of the dome, the supporting ring, they knew that the whole design would rise as there would be no way to turn back.

Michelangelo the architect

Laurentian Library
Around 1530 Michelangelo designed the Laurentian Library in Florence, attached to the church of San Lorenzo. He produced new styles such as pilasters tapering thinner at the bottom, and a staircase with contrasting rectangular and curving forms.

Medici Chapel

Palazzo Farnese
Work on the Palazzo Farnese was begun by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, who was commissioned by Pope Paul III Farnese. Michelangelo took over the works in 1546 after the death of Sangallo. After the death of Julius II building was halted. His sucessor, Pope Paul III, appointed Michelangelo as chief architect following the death of Antonio de Sangallo in 1546. Michelangelo actually razed some sections of the church designed by Sangallo in keeping with the original design by St Peter's first architect, Donato Bramante (1444–1514). However the only elements built according to Michelangelo's designs are sections of the rear facade and the magnificent dome. After his death his student Giacomo della Porta continued with the unfinished portions of the church.

Michelangelo at the Campidoglio
Michelangelo's first designs for solving the intractable urbanistic, symbolic, political and propaganda program for the Campidoglio dated from 1536. The commission was from the Farnese Pope Paul III, who wanted a symbol of the new Rome to impress the emperor and King of Spain Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who was expected to visit the city in 1538. The hill was the Capitoline, the heart of pagan Rome, though that connection was largely obscured by its other role as the center of the civic government of Rome, revived as a commune in the 11th century. The city's government was now to be firmly in papal control, but the Campidoglio was the former scene of many movements of urban resistance, such as the dramatic scenes of Cola di Rienzo's revived republic. Approximately in the middle, not to Michelangelo's liking, now stood the only equestrian bronze to have survived since Antiquity, Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor. It is said that the statue's survival is largely due to its being mistaken for that of Constantine the Great, revered as the first Christian emperor by plebs and popes alike. Michelangelo provided an unassuming pedestal for it.

It was slow work: Little was actually completed in Michelangelo's lifetime, but work continued faithfully to his designs. The Campidoglio was completed in the 17th century, except for the elegant paving design, which was to be finished only three centuries later.

Michelangelo effectively turned Rome’s civic center to face in the direction of St. Peters, and the Christian church. He provided new fronts to the two official buildings of Rome's civic government, which very approximately faced each other, the Palazzo dei Conservatori and the Palazzo Senatorio. The latter had been built over the Tabularium that had once housed the archives of ancient Rome, and which now houses the Capitoline Museums, the oldest museum of antiquities of the world. Michelangelo devised a monumental stair (the Cordonata) to reach the high piazza, so that the Campidoglio resolutely turned its back on the Forum that it had once commanded. He gave the space a new building at the far end, to close the vista, called Palazzo Nuovo, "new palace," and its facade was thought by Michelangelo as an exact copy to that of Palazzo dei Conservatori. It was begun in 1603 and finished in 1654.

The Cordonata is a ramped stair that can be accessed on horseback by the sufficiently great, though it was not in place when Emperor Charles arrived, and the imperial party had to scramble up the slope from the Forum to view the works in progress. The unfolding sequence, Cordonata piazza and the central palazzo are the first urban introduction of the "cult of the axis" that will occupy Italian garden plans and reach fruition in France (Giedion 1962). The two massive ancient statues of Castor and Pollux which decorate the balaustra are not the same posed by Michelangelo, which now are in front of the Palazzo del Quirinale.

The Palazzo dei Conservatori was the first use of a giant order that spanned two storeys, here with a range of Corinthian pilasters and subsidiary Ionic columns flanking the ground-floor loggia openings and the second-floor windows. Another giant order would serve later for the exterior of St Peter's. A balustrade punctuated by sculptures atop the giant pilasters capped the composition, one of the most influential of Michelangelo's designs. The sole arched motif in the entire design is the segmental pediments over the windows, which give a slight spring to the completely angular vertical-horizontal balance of the design.

The bird's-eye view of the engraving by Étienne Dupérac shows Michelangelo's solution to the problems of the space in the Piazza del Campidoglio. Even with their new facades centering them on the new palazzo at the rear, the space was a trapezoid, and the facades did not face each other squarely. Worse than that, the whole site sloped (to the left in the engraving). Michelangelo's solution was radical. Since no "perfect" forms would work, his apparent oval in the paving is actually egg-shaped, narrower at one end. The travertine design set into the paving is perfectly level: around its perimeter, low steps arise and die away into the paving as the slope requires. Its center springs slightly, so that one senses that one is standing on the exposed segment of a gigantic egg all but buried at the center of the city at the center of the world, as Michelangelo's historian Charles de Tolnay pointed out (Charles De Tolnay, 1930). An interlaced twelve-pointed star makes a subtle reference to the constellations, revolving around this space called Caput mundi, the "head of the world."

The paving design was never executed by the popes, who may have detected a subtext of less-than-Christian import. Benito Mussolini ordered the paving completed to Michelangelo's design in 1940.

This article is published under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Italian Renaissance".