Michelangelo Research Paper

Michelangelo: Biography of a Talented Artist

During the dates 1475-1564 there were many famous painters working all around the world. One of which was Michelangelo. He painted and sculpted many famous items that are still talked about today. Michelangelo led a very busy life, as of which you will be reading about today. Michelangelo was born in 1475 in a small village of Caprese near Arezzo At the age of 13 Michelangelo's father Ludovico Buonarroti placed Michelangelo in the workshop of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio through connections with the ruling Medici family. About two years later Michelangelo studied at the sculpture school in the Medici gardens. Shortly thereafter he was invited into the household of the magnificent, Lorenzo
de'Medici. Here he had an opportunity to converse with younger Medici, which later became Pope Leo X. He was also introduced to humanists as Marsilio Ficino and the poet Politian, who were frequent visitors. By the age of 16 Michelangelo had produced two relief sculptures, the battle of the Centaurs and the Madonna of the stairs, which showed that he had achieved a very personal style at a very early age. His patron Lorenzo died in 1492; two years later Michelangelo fled Florence, when the Medici was temporarily expelled. For a while he was settled in Bologna, where in 1494 and 1495 he sculpted several marble statuettes for the areca (shrine) di San Domenico. Michelangelo went to Rome, where he was able to examine many newly unearthed classical statues and ruins. He soon produced his first large sculpture the over life size Bacchus in 1496-1498. One of the few works of pagan rather than Christian subject made by the master rivaled ancient statuary and the highest mark of admiration in Renaissance Rome. At about the same time period Michelangelo did the marble Pietà in 1498. It was finished in 1500. It was one of the most famous works of art, the Pietà was probably finished before Michelangelo was 25 years old, and is the only piece of work he ever signed. In the piece the youthful Mary is shown seated majestically, holding the dead Christ across her lap; it was a theme that was borrowed from northern European art. Instead of revealing extreme grief, Mary is restrained, and her expression is one of resignation. In this work, Michelangelo summarizes the sculptural innovations of his 15th-century predecessors such as Donatello, while ushering in the new monumentality of the high Renaissance style of the 16th-century. The high point of Michelangelo's early style is the gigantic (4.34m/14.24ft) marble David, which was produced between the years 1501and 1504, after returning to Florence. The Old Testament hero is depicted by Michelangelo as a lithe nude youth, muscular and alert, looking of into the distance as if he was sizing up the enemy Goliath, whom he has not yet been encountered with. The fiery intensity of David's facial expression is termed terribilità, a feature characteristic of many of Michelangelo's figures and of his own personality. David, was Michelangelo's most famous sculpture, it became the symbol of Florence and originally was placed in the Piazza della Signoria in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine town hall. With this statue, Michelangelo proved to his contemporaries that he not only surpassed all modern artists, but also the Greeks and the Romans, by infusing formal beauty with powerful expressiveness and meaning. While still occupied with David, Michelangelo was given an opportunity to demonstrate his ability as a painter with the commission of a mural, the Battle of Cascina, destined for the Sala dei Cinqueccento of the Palazzo Vecchio, opposite of Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari. Neither Leonardo nor Michelangelo carried there assignment beyond the stage of a cartoon, a full-scale preparatory drawing. Michelangelo created a series of nude and clothed figures in a wide variety of popes and positions that were a prelude to his next major project, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.
In 1505 the Pope Julius II recalled Michelangelo to Rome for two commissions. The most important one was for the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He worked high above the chapel floor, lying on his back on scaffolding painting for 5 years. Michelangelo painted some of the finest pictorial images of all time between "1508-1512." On the vault of the of the papal chapel, he devised an intricate system of decoration that included nine scenes from the book of Genesis, beginning with the God Separating Light from darkness and including the creation of Adam, the creation of eve, the temptation and fall of Adam and eve, and the flood. These centrally located narratives are surrounded by alternating images of prophets and sibyls on marble thrones, by other Old Testament subjects, and by the studies and cartoons, devising scores of figure types and poses. These awesome, mighty images, demonstrating Michelangelo's masterly understanding of human anatomy and movement, changed the course of painting in the West. Before the assignment of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1505, Michelangelo had been commissioned by Julius II to produce his tomb, which was
planned to be the most magnificent of Christian times. It was to be located in the new Basilica of Saint Peter's, then while under construction. Michelangelo enthusiastically went ahead with this challenging project, which was to include more than 40 figures, spending months in the quarries to obtain the necessary marble. Due to a shortage of money, however, the pope ordered Michelangelo to put aside the tomb project in favor of painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
When Michelangelo went back to work on the tomb, he redesigned it on a much more modest scale. Nevertheless, Michelangelo made some of his finest sculpture for the Julius tomb, including the Moses (1515), the central figure in the much reduced monument now located in Rome's church of San Pietro in Vincoli. The muscular patriarch sits alertly in a shallow niche, holding in its hands the tablets of the Ten Commandments, his long beard entwined in his powerful hands. He looks as if he was communicating with god. Two other statues, The Bound Slave and The Dying Slave (both structured in 1510-1513) demonstrate Michelangelo's approach to carving. He left both statues unfinished either because he was satisfied with them as is, or because he no longer planned to use them. The project for the Julius Tomb required architectural planning, but Michelangelo's activity as an architect began in 1519, with the plan for the façade of the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, where he had once again moved to. In the 1520's he also designed the Laurentian Library and its elegant entrance hall adjoining San Lorenzo. After the completion of these objects Michelangelo took as a starting point thee wall articulation of his Florentine Predecessors, but he infused it with the same surging energy
that characterizes his sculpting and painting's. Michelangelo used motifs-columns, pediments, and brackets- for a personal and expressive purpose. He participated in the 1527-1529 war against the Medici and supervised Florentine fortifications. While living in Florence for this extended period, Michelangelo also undertook the commission of the Medici Tomb's between 1519 and 1534 for the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo. His design called for two large wall tombs facing each other across the high, domed room. One was intended for Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino; and the other for Giuliano de' Medici; Duke of Nemours. The two complex tombs were conceived as representing opposite types: The Lorenzo, the contemplative, introspective personality; the Giuliano, the active, extroverted one. He carved magnificent nude personifications of Dawn and Dusk beneath the seated Lorenzo, Day and night beneath Giuliano; reclining river gods were planned to be carved out on the bottom. The Medici Tombs were worked on long after Michelangelo went back to Rome in 1534, although he never returned to his birth city. In Rome, in 1536, Michelangelo went to work on the Last Judgment for the alter wall of the Sistine Chapel, which was finished by Michelangelo in 1541. It was the largest fresco of the Renaissance, it depicts Judgment day. Christ, with a clap of thunder, puts into motion the inevitable separation, with the saved ascending on the left side of the painting and the damned descending on the right into a Dantesque hell. As was his custom, Michelangelo portrayed all the figures nude, but prudish draperies were added by another artist a decade later, as the cultural climate became more conservative. Michelangelo painted his own image in the flayed skin of Saint Bartholomew. Although he was also given another painting commission, which was the decoration of the Pauline Chapel in the 1540's, his main energies were directed toward architecture during this phase of his life. In 1538-1539 Michelangelo received new plans for the remodeling of the buildings surrounding the Campoidoglio the capitol on the Capitoline Hill, the civic and political heart of the city of Rome. Although Michelangelo's program was not carried out until the late 1550's and not finished until the late 17th century, the Campoidoglio was designed around an oval shape, with the famous bronze equestrian statue of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in the center. At the same time that he preserved traditional Roman monumentality, M Michelangelo brought new unity to the public building facade for the Palazzo dei Conservatori. Michelangelo's crowning achievement as an architect was his work at Saint Peter's Basilica, where he was made chief architect in 1546. According to Donato Bramante the Dome of Saint Peter's Basilica would be constructed from his plans only, but Michelangelo ultimately became responsible for the altar end of the building on the exterior and for the final form of its dome. The great Renaissance poet Ludovico Ariosto wrote succinctly of this famous artist: "Michael more than mortal, divine angel." Indeed, Michelangelo was widely awarded the epithet "divine" because of his extraordinary accomplishments. Two generations of Italian painters and sculptures were impressed by his treatment of the human figure: Raphael, Annibale Carracci, Jacopo da pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Titan. His dome for Saint Peter's became the symbol of authority, as well as the model, for domes all over the Western world; the majority of state capitol buildings in the United States, as well as the Capitol building in Washington D.C., are derived from it. Michelangelo died in 1564 and his body was placed in a fine monument in the church of Santa Croce. To conclude, Michelangelo led a long and very talented life. As a painter, sculpture, poet and architect. He has many famous pieces of work still known and talked about today, all around the world. Many people knew him and love him and those who didn't know him personally, knew of him.