Birth Year : 1475
Death Year : 1564
Country : Italy
Michelagniolodi Lodovico di Lionardo di Buonarroti Simone was born in
Caprese in Tuscany. The son of a civil servant, he attended Latin School
and then studied painting in the workshop of the Ghirlandaio brothers and
sculpture with Bertoldo, a formal pupil of Donatello. Michelangelo's early
training derived from the great Florentine masters of the Low Renaissance:
Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, and Signorelli. A true Renaissance man, he
was gifted as a painter, a sculptor, an architect, an engineer, and a poet,
but his preference was for sculpture with its plastic possibilities for
the revelation and exaltation of the human body. By the time he was fifteen,
Michelangelo had attracted the attention of Lorenzo de'Medici and was invited
to join the scholars, writers and artists who frequented the Medici palace.
This early experience and exposure to Neoplatonic thought influenced his
ideal and concepts throughout his life. Michelangelo began as a sculptor
and made his first statues between 1496 and 1501 in Rome. His first and
possibly his only easel painting was painted in about 1503, a tondo of
The Holy Family in a closely knit triangular composition. Michelangelo's
life coincided with a period of enormous papal power, and from 1505, when
he signed the contract for the tomb of Pope Julius, he was subject to political
pressures, wars, papal orders and counter orders. His greatest painting,
the decoration of the Sistine Chapel was painted single-handedly between
1508 and 1512. The awe-inspiring work represents scenes of the Creation
and the Old Testament through the story of Noah, and begins with Adam receiving
the spark of divine life from God. The symbolic themes, divided architictonically,
present a complicated vision, miraculous in its variety and complete unification.
In 1537, Michelangelo began his Last Judgment, the fresco on the far wall
of the chapel. Here sculptural and architectural vision is replaced by
swirling; space and more pictorial representation of tortured humans corresponding
to the artist's own unhappiness, frustrations, and increasing religious
doubts. In this and in his last paintings (1541-50), for the Paolino Chapel,
he was no longer the exponent of classicism but the forerunner of the Mannerist
School. Michelangelo's genius influenced Raphael, whose work sums up the
best of the classical Renaissance, and then Correggio, Tintoretto,
and countless other painters who have succeeded him through the centuries.
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Buonarroti
Michelangelo
Creation
(detail)
Buonarroti
Michelangelo
Creation
of Adam
Buonarroti
Michelangelo
Creation
of Adam
Buonarroti
Michelangelo
Creazione
di Adamo
Buonarroti
Michelangelo
Testa
Ideale
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