Michelangelo – Master of the Arts
An almost superhuman painter, able to accomplish commissions which would take other painters much longer time to finish, Michelangelo was a strong willed and hot tempered master of Renaissance painting.
Michelangelo Buanarotti was born in the village of Caprese in 1475. His family was well born, but poor, and while he was still very little, Michelangelo was sent to live with a peasant nurse. His nurse’s husband was a stonecutter, so he was probably the one who first taught the boy to carve stone.1
Later, Michelangelo was sent to Florence where he was apprenticed to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. When he became master painter himself, Michelangelo’s very first patron was the great Lorenzo de Medici, also called Lorenzo the Magnificent. Many people recognized the young painter’s skill and talent, so Michelangelo had so many commissions, that he wasn’t able to finish even half of them.2
After a while, looking for better work, Michelangelo went to the city of Bologna. Soon he returned back to Florence, and at that very time a great contest was being held. A large block of pure, white, fine marble was to be given to one artist as a prize. This huge slab, called “The Giant,” was an unfinished piece of work by an earlier artist.3 In the end, Michelangelo was the lucky man. He started working on it immediately and when he was finished, the greatest work of sculpture in the world was revealed – the statue of David.4
But Michelangelo was not only a sculptor, but also a talented painter. Michelangelo was a very religious man and he expressed his personal beliefs in many of his works. His last drawings before his death are thoughtful interpretations on Christian themes such as the crucifixion, and in some works he inserted his own image as an onlooker in a religious scene.5
Personally, I don’t like all of Michelangelo’s works, however, I do have three special favorites. These are the statue Pieta, the painting Dani Tondo and the mural The Last Judgment.
One of Michelangelo’s most famous early works is the Pieta. The Pieta shows the dead Christ in his mother’s lap just after he was taken down from the cross. This theme was quite popular also in France and northern Europe. But in other works, the two figures often appeared quite awkward and the wounds of Christ were exaggerated to bring out an emotional response from the viewer of the statue. Much different is Michelangelo’s version, which shows the Virgin Mary grieving silently and he made Christ’s wounds barely visible. Also, Michelangelo’s version was unbelievably realistic – from bulges on Christ’s underarm where Mary is holding it, to each and every paper-thin fold of her gown.6 Michelangelo originally intended for this piece to be placed in a shallow niche, so that’s why he polished to a smooth finish all the surfaces that would have been visible and gave painstaking care to the drapery. Michelangelo made more versions of the statue, but he never reached the same artistic level as with the first.7
Very shortly I’ll describe a pretty and touching painting called Dani Tondo, which is painted on a round canvas (in fact “Tondo” means “round”). It portrays the Holy Family (Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus) sitting in a lovely meadow and playing with each other, with many figures in the background. This painting was done as a wedding gift for a Florentine lord named Agnolo Doni.8
The last of my favorite paintings is the mural The Last Judgment. Michelangelo was again called to work in the Sistine Chapel (a gigantic mural that he had done earlier on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican) in 1534, and he was commissioned to paint the wall above the altar. The Last Judgment, with which Michelangelo covered the wall, depicts Christ’s second coming at the end of the world. The enormous scene is centered by a figure of Christ who, with his right arm, is striking down the damned, while with the left arm he calls the saved towards him. The scene of hell in the lower right corner does not show Satan or tormenting devils as was traditional at the time, but is based instead on the Inferno, a part of the early 14th century poem, The Divine Comedy, written by Italian writer Dante Alighieri.9
“Brooding, isolated, challenging, temperamental” -- these are the words that best describe Michelangelo’s character and that we still use to describe artists enlightened by an inspiration that seems to be more than human.10
