Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti – Biography and works

one of the geniuses of the Renaissance, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese (Caprese Michelangelo), a village in the upper Val Tiberina today in the province of Arezzo, which at the time was part of the dominions of the Republic of Florence, from Francesca di Neri di Miniato del Sera and Ludovico, of an ancient Florentine family. Of great moral depth, he was a sculptor, painter, architect, and poet and exerted an unprecedented influence on the development of Western art.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born into a family which, for several generations, belonged to a minor Florentine nobility but had lost its patrimony and status by the time of the artist’s birth. His father had only occasional government jobs and, at the time of Michelangelo’s birth, was the administrator of the small village of Caprese. A few months later, however, the family returned to their permanent residence in Florence.

For his family, becoming an artist was a downward social step, and Michelangelo became an apprentice relatively late, at 13. In any case, Michelangelo already, from an early age, had shown an extraordinary propensity for drawing, managing to overcome the resistance of his father, a “religious and good man, and rather of ancient customs” (at this time, in Florence, the painting was still considered a “mechanical” art and unworthy of a young man from a good family): in April 1488, when he was thirteen, he entered Domenico’s workshop as an apprentice Ghirlandaio was the most important painter in Florence at that time (from whom he learned the fresco technique).

The latter was working on the frescoes in the choir of the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella: but the first Buonarroti autographs (three pen drawings, datable to 1488-90, copies by Masaccio of the Church of Santa Maria Carmine and by Giotto of the Peruzzi Chapel in the Basilica of Santa Croce) testify that the fact “that the child was not satisfied with the expert painting of Ghirlandaio means neither more nor less the rejection of the subtle and nervous sensibility of the Florentine art of the third generation of the century, the annoyance for that spirit of episodic naturalism and ornamental elegance that characterized it and the need to return to the grandiose and synthetic spirit of the early fifteenth century” (Salvini). After only one year, he left Ghirlandaio’s workshop, having told (his future biographer Condivi) that he had nothing else to learn.

From the year 1490, in which Michelangelo begins to frequent the circle of Lorenzo the Magnificent (who, admiring his skills as a sculptor, treats him “no differently than as a son”) up to 1503, there remain no certainly autographed pictorial works: in the two tables with the Madonna and the Deposition of Christ, attributable to 1510 and kept in the National Gallery in London, critics have preferred to see the hand of an unknown artist, perhaps a friend of Michelangelo, who worked under his inspiration and assistance. Within the circle of the “Magnificent,” Michelangelo had access to the Medici art collection, dominated by fragments of ancient Roman sculpture. The bronze sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni, who looked after the collection, was closest to a master sculptor, but Michelangelo did not follow his approach. However, one of the two marble works that survive the artist’s early years is a variation on the composition of an ancient Roman sarcophagus. Bertoldo had produced a similar one in bronze. This composition is the Battle of the Centaurs (c. 1492). The action and power of the figures herald the artist’s later interests, much more so than the Madonna delle Scale (c. 1491), a delicate bas-relief reflecting the recent fashions of Florentine sculptors such as Desiderio da Settignano.

Florence, in this period, was considered the major center of art in existence, capable of producing the best painters and sculptors in Europe, and the competition between artists was stimulating. The city, however, no longer offered large commissions, and important Florentine artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo’s teacher, had moved away to get better opportunities in other cities. The Medici were overthrown in 1494, and even before the end of the political turmoil, Michelangelo had left Florence for Bologna.

In the Emilian city, he was engaged to succeed a recently deceased sculptor and sculpt the last small figures needed to complete a large project in the Basilica of San Domenico, the tomb and sanctuary of San Domenico, the so-called Arca di San Domenico (1494-95 ). The young Michelangelo contributed some small but significant statues: that of San Petronio, of San Procolo, and the angel holding the candlestick on the right. The three marble figures are original and expressive. Building on the imaginative agility of his predecessor, he imposed seriousness on his images with a compactness of form that owes much to classical antiquity and the Florentine tradition from Giotto onwards. His choice of marble as a medium also reflects this emphasis on seriousness. The simplification of the masses accompanying it contrasts with the then-more-usual tendency to make the representations coincide as much as possible with the structure and detail of the bodies of humans. Of course, while these are constant qualities in Michelangelo’s art, they are often temporarily abandoned or modified due to other factors, such as the specific functions of the works or the challenging creations of other artists.

The Bacchus

This was the case with Michelangelo’s first large surviving statue, the Bacchus, produced in Rome in 1496-97 after a brief return to Florence and now in the Bargello Museum. (A recently discovered wooden crucifix, attributed by some scholars to Michelangelo and now housed in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, has also been proposed as an antecedent of the Bacchus in the drawing by those accrediting it as a work by the artist). The Bacchus is based on ancient Roman nude figures as a starting point but is much more mobile and complex in profile. Conscious instability evokes the Dionysian god of wine, who enjoys himself with extraordinary virtuosity. Made for a garden, it is also unique among Michelangelo’s works in asking for observation from all sides rather than primarily from the front.

The Pietà

The Bacchus immediately led to the commission by the French cardinal Jean de Bilhères, in 1498, of the Pietà, one of the most famous works in the history of art, destined for the Chapel of Santa Petronilla (the chapel of the kings of France) in St. Peter’s Basilica. The name “Pietà” does not refer (as is often assumed) to this specific work but to a common traditional type of devotional image more common in northern Europe, of which it is the most famous example today. Extracted from narrative scenes of the lamentation after Christ’s death, the concentrated sculptural group of the two subjects was designed to evoke the viewer’s repentant prayers for the sins that required Christ’s sacrificial death. The most complex problem for the artist to face was that of extracting two figures from a block of marble, an unusual and very difficult undertaking in all periods. Michelangelo treated the group as a dense and compact mass with an imposing impact. Yet, he underlined the many contrasts present – of male and female, vertical and horizontal, clothed and naked, dead and alive – to clarify the two components. Michelangelo, when he sculpted the Pietà, was only 23 years old.

David of Michelangelo

The commission immediately strengthened the importance of the Florentine artist established by Pietà in 1501 David for the cathedral of Florence. For this gigantic statue, an exceptionally large commission in Florence, Michelangelo reused a block that had been left unfinished some 40 years earlier. The modeling was particularly close to the formulas of classical antiquity, with a simplified geometry suitable for the large scale but with a slight affirmation of organic life in its asymmetry. The majestic sculpture was the first affirmation of the Renaissance ideal of perfect humanity. Although it was originally intended for the buttress of the cathedral, the magnificence of the finished work convinced Michelangelo’s contemporaries to install it in a more prominent location, determined by a commission of leading artists and citizens. They decided that the David would be installed in front of the entrance to the Palazzo dei Priori (now Palazzo Vecchio) as the very symbol of the Florentine Republic.

In the same years (1501-04), Michelangelo produced several Madonnas for private houses, the basis of the work of the artists of the time. These include a statuette, two circular painting-like reliefs suggesting various levels of spatial depth, and the artist’s single easel canvas. While the statue (Madonna and Child) is frozen and motionless, the painting (Holy Family or Tondo Doni) and one of the reliefs (Madonna and Child with the infant Saint John) is full of movement; they show arms and legs of figures intertwined in actions involving movement through time. The shapes bear symbolic references to the future death of Christ, common in images of the Christ Child of the time; they also betray the artist’s fascination with Leonardo’s work. Michelangelo regularly denied that anyone had influenced him, and his statements were generally accepted without fear. But Leonardo’s return to Florence in 1500 after nearly 20 years was exciting for younger artists, and late 20th-century scholars generally agreed that Michelangelo was among the most affected people. Leonardo’s works were the most powerful and lasting external influences to shape his work. He could blend the artist’s ability to show momentary processes with his own to show weight and strength without losing any of these. qualities. The resulting images of massive bodies in vigorous action are those special creations that constitute the bulk of his most admired works.