vince’s ear

It is impossible to calculate the exact influence this Florentine Renaissance Man has had on the art world in the centuries since his death. He was a painter, sculptor, architect, draughtsman, and poet, and was a master in all these trades. Few painters or sculptors have matched his grace and attention to detail when it came to the human body. His David as well as the Ignudi painted around the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel show a mastery of human anatomy as well as an insight into humanity rarely achieved. While previous artist represented humans as being ideally crafted, Michelangelo chose rather to emphasize the real beauty of the body. Man was created in God’s image, and his true form should be depicted in all its glory.

He was born near Tuscany in 1475, and moved to Florence as a young boy. There he studied with the humanist scholar Fransesco da Urbino but showed little interest in his studies, preferring to copy famous paintings and work on his art. Soon he would take an apprenticeship for sculpting as well as painting. He left the apprenticeship after a short period and was drawn to the humanist circles of Lorenzo de Medici. After the death of Lorenzo, Michelangelo left Florence for Rome where he completed his first sculpture Bacchus. By the time he was thirty, he had already sculpted the Pieta and the David.

In 1505 Michelangelo met and received patronage from Pope Julius II, and would receive two commissions which would take years of his life, and cause much hardship and turmoil. Two monumental jobs were given around the same time by the Pope, one of which would never be completed. The gigantic tomb for Julius was to be designed and completed with forty figures to be sculpted by the artist. Also Julius had desired the ceiling of his chapel, the Sistene, named for Pope Sixtus IV. The latter would finally be completed after four years but resulted in several serious health problems for the painter, including eye infections from the paint dripping while he was on his back on the scaffolding. The Pope was unyielding with his deadlines and nagging, but Michelangelo, though working mostly alone, finally completed one of the most famous frescoes in art history.

Michelangelo never even considered himself a painter and had begrudgingly accepted the commission at the insistence of Pope Julius. He wrote, while working on the project, “I am not in a good place, nor am I a painter,” which pretty well sums up his thoughts at the time. He even considered his frescoes to be “dead paintings.” Nonetheless, his mastery as a painter is unmatched by contemporaries, save perhaps by Leonardo and Raphael, which, of course, is subjective and debatable. Though most of his art was commissioned by the Church, it was he himself, not the subjects of his artwork, who his contemporaries called “Divine.”