Like Leonardo, Michelangelo was another celebrity artist, particularly during the period that was referred to as the High Renaissance, in the years from around 1490 to 1530.
These two giants of the Renaissance were nothing alike and didn’t like each other. At all.
Leonardo was charming and well dressed and enjoyed the pleasures of life, such as music, parties and good food. He was a kind man and liked to buy little birds in cages at the market and set them free.
Michelangelo had a reputation of rarely bathing and wearing dirty clothes. He had almost superhuman drive and would become so obsessed with whatever he was working on that he’d forget to eat or sleep.
Although he created world famous frescoes in Rome, Michelangelo never thought of himself as a painter. He considered himself a sculptor. To him, that was a far more noble and difficult profession than being a painter. He would stare for hours at a block of stone until finally he saw the way to release “the soul” buried inside.
Growing up
Michelangelo, born in 1475 (23 years after Leonardo), could have led a very easy life. He was from a well-off Florentine family, the Buonarrotis. However, not long after he was born, his mother became sick so he was sent to live with a nurse and her husband in a nearby village. The husband was a stonemason and would cut blocks of marble from the quarries nearby, which would be carved into statues. Young Michelangelo was fascinated and dreamt about becoming a sculptor. At age ten, he returned to Florence to live with his family. Like Leonardo, Michelangelo became an apprentice in the workshop of a famous artist called Ghirlandaio.
Ghirlandaio saw immediately that Michelangelo was talented, so he sent him to the palace owned by the Medici, the richest and most powerful family in Florence at the time. In the courtyard of the Medici palace, the teenage boy carved copies of statues that had been created in ancient Greece. Lorenzo de’Medici, the head of the family, was impressed. Here before him was a born sculptor. Lorenzo let Michelangelo spend three years living and working at the palace and treated him like a son.
The Pieta
Relatively unknown at the age of twenty five, Michelangelo received a commission to carve a statue for a cardinal. The Pieta, meaning “pity” or “compassion”, is a marble sculpture of Mary holding her dead son, Jesus, after he was crucified on the cross. It can be seen directly on the right as you enter St. Peter’s Basilica.
Michelangelo travelled to the marble quarries at Carrara in northern Tuscany, selected an immaculate two and a half ton block and supervised its transport to Rome. He committed himself to producing, within a year, the life size sculpture.
On completion, the artist heard that his work was being attributed to a sculptor from Milan. He was so upset that he snuck into the Basilica and carved “This was made by Michelangelo Buonarroti from Florence” on the sash that runs diagonally across Mary’s chest. He became famous overnight and never had to sign his name again.
Statue of David
In 1501, when he was only twenty six, Michelangelo began work on what is one of the best known statues in the world. It is David, the biblical hero who killed a giant named Goliath.
The block of marble that Michelangelo used had been cut years before. However, two other sculptors had already refused to work with it, as the piece of stone was an odd shape and size. Too tall and too narrow, but Michelangelo loved a challenge. Here was a huge block of stone that had sat untouched in a workshop for twenty years.
Michelangelo had big ideas. He worked constantly for over two years to carve a statue that was seventeen feet tall and free standing. This required far greater skill than carving only the front of a statue that would be partly attached to a wall. Generally, statues of David showed him after his victory, however, Michelangelo chose to depict the moment before David delivers the fatal blow. The slingshot is still over his shoulder; the rock is in his hand; his wrinkled brow shows how hard he is concentrating on what he’s about to do.
David was placed in the political heart of Florence in Piazza della Signoria and remained there for four hundred years, a proud symbol of Florence’s independence. In 1873, David was moved to Galleria dell’Accademia to protect it from damage and the weather.
Sistine Chapel
Michelangelo didn’t think much of painters. Nevertheless, in 1508, he began covering the ceiling of the pope’s private chapel in Rome with more than eleven thousand square feet of frescoes. Painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was an enormous undertaking and a dangerous one, as Michelangelo had to work seventy feet above the floor. For a long time it was believed that he painted the frescoes lying on scaffolding, with paint dripping down all over him. That’s not true. He worked standing on a platform, constantly craning his neck, and consequently suffered from terrible neck pain for the rest of his life.
At the end of four exhausting years, the ceiling was completed. There were nine scenes from the Bible, starting with the creation of the world and ending with the story of Noah and the flood. In total, he painted more than three hundred figures on the ceiling, each one exhibiting massive strength and power. Just like Leonardo, Michelangelo dissected bodies to better understand how to make the people in his paintings look real.
St. Peter’s Basilica
In 1547, seventy one year old Michelangelo, the architect, built a huge dome for St. Peter’s Basilica, the largest church in the world. Building the dome was the last commission of Michelangelo’s life. He worked on it for eighteen years, until his death in 1564 at the remarkable age of eighty eight, considered a rare lifespan for that period of time. Michelangelo never married and never had children. He was a solitary figure who focused intensely on his work, resulting in a legacy of incredible work that will remain famous throughout the world forever.
Ci vediamo la prossima settimana.
Deb