Essay/Term paper: Michaelangelo

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Cliff Notes

In the time of the Renaissance there were many artists but one really stood out to me, he was Michelangelo. He stood out the most to me because he had some of the most beautiful work I have ever seen. He painted some of the most beautiful building that is still around today. One of the most that I enjoyed looking at was the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. It took him a lot of time to paint the entire building. I feel this was his best piece of art ever. He had many accomplishments that were outstanding.

The second of five brothers, Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475, at Caprese, in Tuscany, to Ludovico di Leonardo di Buonarotto Simoni and Francesca Neri. The same day, his father noted down: "Today March 6, 1475, a child of the male sex has been born to me and I have named him Michelangelo. He was born on Monday between 4 and 5 in the morning, at Caprese, where I am the Podestà." Although born in the small village of Caprese, Michelangelo always considered himself a "son of Florence," as did his father, "a Citizen of Florence." Buonarroti's mother, Francesca Neri, was too sick and frail to nurse Michelangelo, so he was placed with a wet nurse, in a family of stonecutters, where he, "sucked in the craft of hammer and chisel with my foster mother. When he told my father that he wished to be an artist, he flew into a rage, 'artists are laborers, no better than shoemakers." Buonarroti's mother died young, when the child was only six years old. But even before then, Michelangelo's childhood had been lacking affection, and he was always to retain a good position in his father"s heart. Touchy and quick to respond with fierce words, he tended to keep to himself, out of shyness according to some but also, according to others, a lack of trust in his fellows. His father soon recognized the boy's intelligence and "anxious for him to learn his letters, sent him to the school of a master, Francesco Galeota from Urbino, who in that time taught grammar." While he studied the principles of Latin, Michelangelo made friends with a student, Francesco Granacci six years older than him, who was learning the art of painting in Ghirlandaio's studio and who encouraged Michelangelo to follow his own artistic vocation.

Michelangelo studied the human anatomy in order to make his painting more life like. In doing things the pictures looked and made the viewer feel that the picture was looking back. Studying the human anatomy was very typical among the Renaissance time period. To study the human anatomy he went a step further to study the corpses of the dead which was forbidden by The Church), the prior of the church of Santo Spirito, Niccolò Bichiellini, received a wooden crucifix from Michelangelo, it was a detailed view of Christ"s face. But his contact with the dead bodies caused problems with his health, obliging him to interrupt his activities periodically. Michelangelo produced at least two relief sculptures by the time he was 16 years old, the Battle of the Centaurs and the Madonna of the Stairs which show that he had achieved a personal style at a precocious age. In Michelangelo's personal diary he recounts his first two works: "My first work was a small bas-relief, The Madonna of the Stairs. Mary, Mother of God, sits on the rock of the church. The child curls back into her body. She foresees his death, and his return on the stairway to heaven. "My second work, another small relief. My tutor read me the myth of the battle of the Lapiths against the Centaurs. The wild forces of Life locked in heroic combat. "Already at 16, his mind was a battlefield: his love of pagan beauty, the male nude, at war with his own religious faith. A polarity of themes and forms...one spiritual, the other earthly, I've kept these carvings on the walls of my studio to this very day."

I feel that Michelangelo had many great pieces of art, The Pieta, The David sculpture, and Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. I liked this piece the best because of the size and time it took to create the masterpiece. In 1508, Pope Julius II asked Michelangelo to paint the enormous building. Michelangelo devoted four year to the task spending up to four hours each day. Four hours a day he lay atop a scaffold on his back and painted scenes from the bible. Some scenes were god creating the world and Noah and the Flood. The work was exhausting, but the final product has been admired for almost 500 years. The painting was very bad on his health and causes him to become very sick from being so high on his back for the very long period of time. I feel Michelangelo did a superior job and I would love to go myself and view the magnificent artwork of this skilled artisan.

Michelangelo had a lot of other pieces of work that were magnificent in their own ways. Before the assignment of the Sistine 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 St. Peter's, then under construction. Michelangelo enthusiastically went ahead with the challenging project, which was to include more than 40 figures, spending months in the quarries to obtain the necessary Carrara marble. Due to a mounting shortage of money, however, the pope ordered him to put aside the tomb project in favor of painting the Sistine 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, 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 the tablets of the Ten Commandments, his long beard entwined in his powerful hands. He looks off into the distance as if communicating with God.

As you can see Michelangelo was one of the most skilled artisans in the time of the Reniassance. He had a way of making the sculptures and pictures look real. He was so good he had way of really making the human in the piece look real but carving individual muscles and showing the way the human body is connected. He was the best at showing reality in all of his work. Michelangelo was so into doing the best work he could do; he studied human corpses to see the way joints and muscles connected. This seemed kind of crazy but it paid off. His work was beautiful.









-Additional Information-

Loneliness and sorrow were Michelangelo's companions in the last years of his life. His younger friends, Vittoria Colonna and Luigi del Riccio were already dead, and in 1556 his faithful servant Urbino died too. In this period, he insistently produced studies and drawings of the Crucifixion and the Lament over the Dead Christ. They were also the years of his last sculptures, including the Florentine Pieta, carved for his own tomb. Dissatisfied with his work, Michelangelo attacked the sculpture with a hammer, breaking off a leg and an arm from the figure of Christ and one of the Virgin Mary's hands. Another sculpture the so-called Rondanini Pieta, consisting solely of the figures of the Madonna and Christ, may have been begun by Michelangelo before 1550 but had remained unfinished. Now his friends - we are told by Vasari - had asked him to start work on it again "so that he could continue using his chisel everyday." Still perfectly lucid, the almost ninety-year-old Michelangelo created one of his most spiritual images, in which the Mother and Christ almost interpenetrate in an indissoluble union, beyond passion and physical death.

While residing in Florence for this extended period, Michelangelo also undertook-between 1519 and 1534-the commission of the Medici Tombs 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; the other for Giulinao De" Medici duke of Nemours. The tombs of the Medici were of a completely new form. Michelangelo abandoned the use of architecture and arabesques that decorated all Florentine tombs, and that he himself had widely used in his designs for the tomb of Pope Julius II. Here, he wanted no accessory forms, and only the statues were to express the thoughts of his soul.