Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (Caprese, March 6, 1475 - Rome, February 18, 1564), better known simply as Michelangelo or Michelangelo, was an Italian painter, sculptor, poet, anatomist and architect, considered one of the greatest creators in the history of Western art.

He developed his artistic work for over seventy years between Florence and Rome, where his great patrons, the Medici family of Florence, and several Roman popes lived. He began as an apprentice to the brothers Davide and Domenico Ghirlandaio in Florence.

Having his talent soon recognized, he became a protégé of the Medici, for whom he made several works. He then settled in Rome, where he left most of his most representative works.

His career developed in the transition from Renaissance to Mannerism, and his style synthesized influences from the art of classical antiquity, the first Renaissance, the ideals of humanism and Neoplatonism, centered on the representation of the human figure, especially the male nude, which he portrayed with enormous power.  

Several of his creations are among the most famous in Western art, highlighting in sculpture the Bacchus, the Pietà, the David, the two Medici tombs, and the Moses; in painting the vast cycle of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the Last Judgment in the same place, and two frescoes in the Pauline Chapel;

He served as architect of St. Peter's Basilica implementing major reforms to its structure and designing the dome, remodeled the Roman Capitoline square and designed several buildings, and wrote a great number of poems.

While he was still alive, he was considered the greatest artist of his time; he was called the Divine, and throughout the centuries, until today, he has been held in the highest regard, part of the small group of artists of universal fame, in fact as one of the greatest who ever lived and as the prototype of genius.

He was one of the first Western artists to have his biography published while he was still alive. His fame was such that, like no previous artist or contemporary of his, numerous records of his career and personality survive, and objects he had used or simple sketches for his works were kept as relics by a legion of admirers.

For posterity Michelangelo remains one of the few artists who were able to express the experience of the beautiful, the tragic and the sublime in a cosmic and universal dimension.

Michelangelo's Biography

Early years

Michelangelo was the second son of Lodovico di Lionardo Buonarroti Simoni and Francesca di Neri Buonarroti. On his baptismal certificate his name appears in two forms, Michelagnelo and Michelagnolo Buonaroti; it appears in Vasari's biography as Michelagnolo Bonarroti and in Condivi's as Michelagnolo Buonarroti.

As a young man he signed himself as Michelagniolo. These first biographies were written when he was still alive and his fame was at its peak, and his admirers, not content with establishing a high pedigree for his family - whose genealogy appears doubtful today - tried to magnify events related to his birth and childhood, allegedly prophetic of his future glory.

For example, it was said that his mother fell off a horse while carrying him in her arms, but he was said to have emerged unharmed from the accident; while still a baby sleeping in the same crib as his brother, his brother contracted a serious contagious disease, from which he died, but Michelangelo miraculously remained uninfected.

His birth chart was also said to predict a bright future, because of a conjunction of Venus, Mars, and Jupiter on the Ascendant. Condivi said that his family was ancient and belonged to the nobility, which was accepted as fact at the time he lived.

He was said to be a descendant of the counts of Canossa, from the Reggio Emilia region, having among his ancestors the celebrated Matilde of Canossa, and connected by blood to emperors.

A member of the family, Simone da Canossa, would have settled in Florence in 1250 and been made a citizen of the Republic, in charge of the administration of one of the six Florentine divisions.

There he later changed his surname from Canossa to Buonarroti, because of the prestige that several individuals of the family named Buonarroto acquired as magistrates, and this branch of the House of Canossa came to be known as the House of' Buonarroti Simoni.

Lodovico at the time of Michelangelo's birth was administrator of the villages of Caprese and Castello di Chiusi, subordinate to Florence. A month later, however, his term of office expiring, the family moved permanently to Florence, but the baby, as was the custom, was given to a nanny to be raised in Settignano, another Florentine village, on a family estate.

At the age of three he returned to live in his father's house, and at the age of six he lost his mother. His brothers were Lionardo, his firstborn, and more Buonarroto, Giovansimone and Gismondo. His father, although he had some prestige, was not wealthy.

His family was large and his income, based mainly on the rural property in Settignano, was insufficient to maintain a high standard of living. The salary he received from the Republic was low, 500 lire every six months, and he was obliged to pay with it two notaries, three servants and a stable boy.

The family's former fortune, acquired in trade and foreign exchange, had begun to dissipate with his own father, who had to provide dowries for his daughters, pay off large debts, and obtain no lucrative positions, and the situation worsened in the next generation, to the point where they were close to losing their patrician status and decaying into commoners.

Recognizing that Michelangelo was especially gifted, as soon as he reached the appropriate age Lodovico sent him to be educated by Francesco da Urbino, expecting him to pursue a prestigious career.

To his frustration, his son made little progress in grammar, Latin, and mathematics, and stole time from his studies to seek the company of artists and draw.

He became friends with Francesco Granacci, a disciple of Domenico Ghirlandaio, who encouraged him in the arts and took him to frequent his master's studio, with the result that he abandoned interest in regular instruction, and for this he received repeated punishments from his father and brothers, for whom an artistic career was unworthy of the nobility of his lineage.

Nevertheless, he finally managed to overcome paternal opposition and was admitted as a painting disciple of the brothers Davide and Domenico Ghirlandaio, through a contract with a stipulated duration of three years, signed on April 1, 1489, earning a salary of 24 gold florins, which was not a customary practice at that time.

Condivi said that Michelangelo's first finished work was the painting Saint Anthony Abbot tormented by demons from an engraving by Martin Schongauer, so well done that it would have aroused Domenico's envy.

Relations between the two must have been strained, for Michelangelo was in the habit of boasting of being superior to Domenico, and once dared to correct his drawings, humiliating him, which was no small thing, since he was then one of the most important painters in Florence, and the insolence must have had a deep impact on the master's spirit.

Another piece he produced at the time, a copy of an ancient head, would have worked so well that the owner of the original, receiving the copy instead, failed to notice the exchange. Only by the indiscretion of one of Michelangelo's companions was the trick discovered, and by comparing both works, Michelangelo's talent became recognized.

But it is probable that these accounts were greatly exaggerated - Vasari, in the second version of his biography, said that Condivi's work contained many untruths -, for considering the short time he remained there, and knowing today the rigorous disciplinary habits of the artistic apprenticeship of the time, which began with the most humble tasks, he would hardly have been able to develop so early a technique capable of producing works of such high quality as is declared.

He would still be just a servant, like all beginners, keeping the materials and tools of the masters and senior disciples in order and in usable condition, cleaning the space, and being at the masters' disposal to meet any other demands for the good functioning of the workshop.

In the little time they had left, they were allowed to exercise their drawing skills by copying famous models, but this was rare in this first phase, because, besides the labor being exhausting, paper was very expensive and could not be spent for nothing with students who were still unprepared.

Only when the students had mastered this instrumental part and knew in depth the properties of the materials of art were they given access to the most basic rudiments of creation, serving then as direct assistants to the masters, but still only stretching the canvases and preparing the wooden panels, giving them the base layers, painting some less important details of the composition and deepening the study of drawing.

However, it seems certain that by the time he joined Ghirlandaio's workshop Michelangelo had already practiced a lot of drawing, and so it is difficult to determine exactly how far the truth of early biographies goes, not least because they constantly tend to exalt their subject, even if it is recognized that his talent was early and his development, very rapid.

Michelangelo's Youth

Michelangelo did not finish his apprenticeship with the Ghirlandaio. A year later he left the atelier and entered the protection of Lorenzo de Medici. Authors differ about the circumstances of this event.

Perhaps because of his rebellious temperament he became an irritating presence to his masters, also he apparently did not enjoy painting as much as sculpture; Barbara Somervill said that her father, trusting in the strength of a distant kinship with the Medici and Lorenzo's willingness to help his poor relatives, appealed to him to accept him as an apprentice;

Vasari and Condivi claim that it was by direct request from Lorenzo to Lodovico. Be that as it may, at the age of fifteen he actually moved into the Medici palace. Lorenzo was the head of their illustrious family, then the richest in Italy, ruled de facto Florence although he had no official position, and had gathered around him a brilliant court of humanists and artists, being himself a poet and intellectual.

It was a fortunate circumstance for Michelangelo, for he received the attractive salary of five ducats a week, and was able to enjoy the personal friendship with the patron, eating at his table, and the erudite atmosphere of his circle, in which Angelo Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino participated, reinforcing his precarious education and coming into contact with Neoplatonism.

He also made friends among the sons of the house, who later became his patrons, and most important for his career was being able to attend the famous Sculpture Garden that Lorenzo had organized with an important collection of fragments of classical antiquity, from whose study he drew substantial information to develop his personal style in sculpture.

To manage this garden, Lorenzo had hired the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni, who had been a pupil of Donatello, and with him Michelangelo had something approaching a sculpture teacher, although apparently he did not follow his methods.

His first work for Lorenzo seems to have been a faun's head, which did not survive, but was reportedly so well done that with it Lorenzo definitely surrendered to the young man's talent.

Other works from this phase were a crucifix for the prior of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, which allowed him to dissect corpses to study their anatomy, a bas-relief known today as the Madonna of the Staircase, in the manner of Donatello, and the high-relief of the Centauromachia, created on the advice of Poliziano and possibly inspired by a motif found in a Roman sarcophagus, which aroused the admiration even of the following generations as a mature work, even though it was left uncompleted.

Soon after, on April 8, 1492, Lorenzo died, leaving the government to his son Peter of Medici (Piero), who was only twenty-one years old. According to Condivi, for Michelangelo the death of his patron was a great shock, and he remained for days in deep sadness, incapable of any action.

He retired to his father's house, where he sculpted a Hercules of great dimensions, which was sold to Francis I of France, but whose whereabouts are unknown. Then a great snowfall came over Florence, and Peter remembered his friend. He summoned him to his palace to make a snowman, and renewed his invitation to live in the Medici palace, so that things would continue the way they were before Lorenzo died.

The invitation was accepted and Michelangelo again became a favorite, but Peter lacked all the political wisdom of his father, was tyrannical and completely inept for his position. So much so that he attracted Savonarola's condemnation and popular discontent grew rapidly.

Realizing the fatal turn of events, and because of his close association with Peter, Michelangelo secretly fled first to Bologna, and then on to Venice, a few weeks before Florence was invaded by Charles VIII of France and Peter was overthrown and driven out of there along with his entire family.

Failing to get work in Venice, he returned to Bologna, where he found a new patron in Gianfrancesco Aldovrandi, in whose house he stayed for a year. At his suggestion, he produced figures for the unfinished tomb of St. Dominic, an Angel holding a candelabra, a St. Proclo, and a St. Petronius, and entertained his patron with readings from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, appreciated for their Tuscan dialect being the same in which they had been written.

Meanwhile, he became acquainted with classicist works by Jacopo della Quercia, which exerted a significant influence on his style. In the winter of 1495, he returned briefly to Florence. C

ondivi and Vasari reported that Michelangelo met with Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, who encouraged him to sculpt a Saint John, and then a sleeping Cupid, inducing the artist to patinate it so that it could be sold as an antique for a good price on the Roman market. Michelangelo is said to have sent it to Rome in 1496 and acquired it by Cardinal Raffaele Riario, but Clacment claims that the story is very dubious.

Maturity

In any case he traveled to Rome afterwards and stayed for a year with Riario, but for him apparently produced nothing.

His next work, a drunken Bacchus of large dimensions and distinctly classical features, was made at the request of the banker Jacopo Galli, who also requested a standing Cupid, and through whom Michelangelo met Cardinal Jean de la Grolaye de Villiers, France's ambassador to the Pope, who commissioned the celebrated Pietà, a subject rare in Italy but common in France, which was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece, elevating him to fame.

He soon received other commissions, including fifteen statuettes of saints for Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini, but realized of these only four, stopping work in 1501 to answer a call from Florence Cathedral.

The commission was for a David, to be installed in the buttresses of the cathedral. Michelangelo chose a huge marble block that had been partially worked by other sculptors but had remained abandoned for forty years, more than 5 meters high.

Carving a work of this magnitude is still a huge technical challenge, and when it was completed in 1504 the result was considered so brilliant and magnificent that a committee of notables was formed to decide where to place it, as it was thought to deserve a more prominent position than previously foreseen.

So it was installed in front of the Palace of the Priors, the administrative seat of the Republic, as a symbol of Florentine civic virtues. During these years involved with the David, Michelangelo still found time to create several Madonnas for private patrons, one in statue form, two in relief, and one painting, the latter being especially significant as a precursor example of Florentine Mannerism.

Condivi mentioned two more works, in bronze, a David and a Madonna, which are not known. After the unqualified success of his David, Michelangelo was drawn to monumental projects, but rarely took on direct helpers, so that many of them were unfinished.

Such was the case with the other undertaking with which the Florentine magistrates commissioned him, a large fresco for the Council Hall depicting the Battle of Cascina, an event of the war in which Florence conquered Pisa.

Leonardo da Vinci was asked at the same time to do another large painting on the opposite wall of the room.

Neither of the two was finished, and Michelangelo's did not even get out of the preparatory study. In 1505, Michelangelo accepted a request for twelve large Apostles in marble for the Cathedral, but only one, Matthew, was begun, and even this was abandoned before it was finished, for Pope Julius II had called him to Rome.

Julius was as fascinated by the great as Michelangelo, and he was willful; his friction with the artist, whose temperament was also strong, became legendary. He had planned to erect a portentous tomb for himself, with forty statues. Once the design was defined, Michelangelo traveled to the marble mines in Carrara to select the stones, spending eight months there.

When the material arrived in Rome, it occupied a good part of St. Peter's Square. But Julius being engaged at the same time in rebuilding the vast St. Peter's Basilica, the funds for the work soon dried up. Michelangelo supposed that the architect of St. Peter's, Bramante, had poisoned the pope against him, and left Rome, returning to Florence.

The pope put pressure on the Florentine authorities demanding his return, and instead of continuing work on his tomb, he ordered him to create a colossal bronze statue of himself to be installed in Bologna, which he had just conquered in his military expeditions.

After it was finished, he begrudgingly accepted the commission to paint the enormous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, completed in only four years, between 1508 and 1511. The result went far beyond papal expectations, and even though Michelangelo was not very comfortable with the technique of painting, always preferring sculpture, he proved to possess a pictorial genius comparable to that which produced the David and the Pietà.

As soon as he finished the ceiling, Julius ordered him to return to work on his tomb, which was never finished according to the original plan. Julius died in 1513 and the project was then revised several times and successively reduced by the other popes, becoming a much more modest work than intended.

Of the forty statues in the plan, the present monument has only seven, and of these only the Moses (1513-15) is of real value, being a sculptural counterpart to the great figures on the Sistine ceiling.

Six others, unfinished but also of great interest, representing slaves and prisoners, originally intended as part of the ensemble, were dispersed and are today in the Louvre Museum in Paris and the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. Another important piece from the period was a nude Christ the Redeemer for the Church of Santa Maria on Minerva.

Julius' successor was a youthful friend of Michelangelo's, the second son of Lorenzo de Medici, Giovanni, who was made pope by the name of Leo X. The ruler of Florence then was Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, later also pope by the name of Clement VII. Both employed the artist mainly in Florence in works of glorification of their family.

For them Michelangelo penetrated into the realm of architecture, drawing up a plan for the remodeling of the facade of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, never realized, but his efforts bore better fruit in a smaller project, the construction and decoration of the New Sacristy attached to the Basilica.

The most significant works in the Sacristy are the original tombs of Julian II de Medici and Lorenzo II de Medici, each comprising an idealized statue of the deceased and two decorative figures reclining on the coffin, not all entirely finished but of great power, already in a clearly Mannerist style.

In the same period Michelangelo designed another building attached to the Basilica, the Laurentian Library, to receive the collection bequeathed by Pope Leo X after his death. The structure is remarkable for its free interpretation of the classical architectural canons, making it the first and one of the most important examples of architectural Mannerism.

In 1527 Rome was invaded and violently sacked by rebel troops of Charles V, emperor of the Holy Empire. The pope fled, and Florence again revolted against the Medici, banishing them. Then the city was besieged, and in this period Michelangelo was employed by the local government in engineering works, designing fortifications.

This decade and the next were especially difficult for him. His father had died in 1521, and then his favorite brother. Michelangelo worried about the advancing years and feared death, and still became involved in family affairs to ensure the perpetuation of the Buonarroti name.

In his affective life he connected strongly with young men, especially with Tommaso dei Cavalieri, exchanging warm correspondence and writing them poetry of great quality, dealing with the theme of love in the tradition of Petrarch and expressing Neoplatonic ideas.

These connections and material testimonies have been considered by a large number of scholars as evidence of homosexuality, but for an influential minority, of which Gilbert Creighton, editor of the Britannica, participates, it is likely that he was more concerned with finding an adopted son and that his emotional overflow was nothing more than literary rhetoric.

In 1530 the Medici were able to definitively impose their rule in Florence, Michelangelo returned to the project of the family tombs and produced two sculptures, a Genius of Victory, which became a prototype for Mannerist sculptors, and a David, sometimes also identified as Apollo.

In 1534 he left the city for the last time, at the call of the new pope, Paul III, taking up residence in Rome, although he always cherished the hope of being able to return and finish his unfinished projects.

Last decades

During this phase Michelangelo left sculpture aside for a while and turned to architecture, poetry, and painting. Paul III had called him to paint the scene of the Last Judgment on the wall behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel. The composition was another masterpiece, but in a style very different from that of the ceiling, and reflects the impact of the Counter-Reformation on the culture of the time.

The design is powerful and the figures are still grand, but their anatomical description is less clear. On the other hand, the psychological and dramatic intensity is much more impressive. A scene planned for the opposite wall, showing the Fall of Lucifer, was drawn on cardboard but not realized. However, according to Vasari the drawing was taken advantage of by a minor artist in Todi Cathedral, with poor execution.

Immediately afterwards he was called upon to paint two more large panels in the Pauline Chapel, illustrating the Crucifixion of St. Peter and the Conversion of Saul. During this period he developed a deep affective bond with the Roman patrician Vittoria Colonna, which lasted until her death in 1547, sharing an interest in poetry and religion.

He designed the remodeling of Capitoline Square, one of the city's most notable urban projects, and in his capacity as the new architect of St. Peter's, a position also accepted with great reluctance, he drew up the plans for the reform of its structure from the ideas left by Bramante, discarding additions by other collaborators and reverting the plan to the Greek cross.

He also designed the dome, a great work of architecture, although built only after he died, with slight modifications. While working at St. Peter's he became involved in smaller architectural projects, completing the unfinished Farnese Palace, advising on the works of the Villa Giulia, St. Peter's Church in Montorio, and the Vatican Belvedere, and providing a design, not used, for the remodeling of the Basilica of St. John of the Florentines.

In 1555 Paul IV ascended the papacy and immediately opened a conflict with the Spanish government in Naples, while intensifying the Counter-Reformation procedures and supporting the Inquisition.

He cancelled the chancellorship of Rimini that Paul III had granted to Michelangelo, a good source of income for him, and wanted to destroy the Last Judgment in the Sistine, considered indecent, which only did not happen thanks to the firm opposition of several cardinals; even then several nudes were covered up.

The climate in Rome became tense, French troops entered the Papal States, and Michelangelo, in 1557, sought temporary refuge in a monastery in Spoleto, leaving the work on the Basilica to assistants. Returning to Rome soon after, he devoted himself to the design of a tomb for himself, never executed, but for it he sculpted the Pietà in Florence, where it is believed he left his self-portrait in the figure of Joseph of Arimathea.

Then he returned to the works at St. Peter's, but his decisions were continually disobeyed by the assistants, creating a stressful situation. In 1559 the pope died. He was so hated that the Roman people gave great demonstrations of jubilation upon hearing the news, and Duppa says it must have been a relief to the artist as well.

Pius IV kept Michelangelo as architect of St. Peter's - from this period is the design of the dome - and restored to him part of the rents from Rimini. He designed a monument in honor of the pope's brother to be installed in Milan Cathedral, executed by others, built the Porta Pia, remodeled Diocletian's Baths into the Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels and Martyrs, and designed a chapel in the Basilica of St. Mary Major, completed posthumously.

Michelangelo's appointment as chief architect of St. Peter's had never pleased the directors of the work and the assistant architects, pressures finally triumphed, and in 1562 he was removed from the post.

But soon the situation was reversed in his favor, for Michelangelo requested an interview with the pope and exposed to him the intrigues that had led to the situation. The pope had the case examined, confirmed Michelangelo's allegations, and reinstated him as head of the works.

In 1563, he was elected primus inter pares of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, newly founded by Cosimo I de' Medici and Vasari, and only after that, at the age of ninety, his health and vigor began to decline rapidly and visibly.

He had little time left, and in the passage from 1563 to 1564 it became clear that he could no longer go out at any time and in any weather as he used to, nor could he refuse help from others as had been his perennial habit. On February 14, 1564 he suffered a kind of attack, and news spread that he was ill.

Nevertheless, his friend Tiberio Calcagni, who rushed to visit him, found him in the street in the rain, saying that he could not find peace at all. According to the account, his face looked terrible and his speech was slurred. He went into the house and retired to rest.

Other friends came to attend to him, and the next day he sensed death and sent for his nephew Lionardo, but he did not arrive in time to see him alive. He died peacefully shortly before five in the afternoon of the 18th, in the company of Tiberio Calcagni, Diomede Leoni, Tommaso dei Cavalieri and Daniele da Volterra, as well as the doctors Federigo Donati and Gherardo Fidelissimi.

By order of the governor of Rome the body was deposited with great honors in the Basilica of the Twelve Holy Apostles, but Lionardo wished it to rest in Florence, and had to steal the corpse and ship it to the other city disguised as merchandise, being delivered to the local customs on March 11.

From there he was removed to an oratory, and the next day secretly taken to the Basilica of the Holy Cross, but the movement was noticed by the people and soon a large crowd formed to follow the procession, paying his last respects. The group entered the Basilica, which was completely packed, and the lieutenant of the Accademia ordered the coffin to be opened.

According to the records, twenty-five days after his death, the body was still intact and without any odor. So he was buried behind the Cavalcanti altar. On July 14 a large public ceremony honored his memory. The poems and panegyrics written for the day filled a volume, which was published afterwards. His final tomb was designed by Giorgio Vasari and is in the Basilica of the Holy Cross. Later several cities erected monuments to him.

Michelangelo's Personality

As an adult Michelangelo was of medium height and had broad shoulders and strong arms, the result of his endless hours working with stone. His hair was dark and his eyes were small and brown, he wore a beard split in two, his lips were thin, his nose was broken from a fight in his youth with Pietro Torrigiano, and his forehead was prominent.

He paid no attention to his physical appearance, dressed in old, sometimes even ragged, clothes that were invariably dirty. Even so, he often slept in them and in his shoes. Likewise, he was indifferent about food, ate little and irregularly, had poor digestion; he was as satisfied with a piece of cheese as with a multi-course meal, like the ones he ate when invited by the powerful.

He didn't care where he went to sleep and had a short sleep, suffered from headaches, and with advancing years had gall bladder problems and rheumatism in the legs, but in general enjoyed good health until the last year of his life.

He worked tirelessly, was able to acquire a fairly broad general education even without regular instruction, and few things interested him beyond his art. Among these, as is evident from his letters, he had concerns about perpetuating and dignifying the family name.

In several, addressed to his nephew Lionardo, he urged him to marry a noblewoman worthy of the Buonarroti, and urged him to leave the countryside and live in an urban palace, the most obvious sign of a patrician's status. In others he expresses his ambition to "resurrect his House," and his desire for both personal and family glory is documented by other testimonies.

While he lived, folklore formed about his personality, describing him as terribile, that is, passionate and violent. He was also considered distrustful, irritable, antisocial, eccentric and melancholic, shy and miserly, and many called him mad.

Vasari and Condivi found it necessary to emphasize that these descriptions were libelous, but this proves that they were current, even if they may not have corresponded to the whole truth. They instead described him as a deeply religious person, on whom Savonarola's preaching on detachment from worldly goods had a lasting impact.

He had read his works to the end of his days and said he remembered his voice clearly. He was also said to be liberal and generous, giving valuable works as gifts to his friends and being kind to his servants.

As a teacher he did not hide his knowledge from his disciples, but he did not like it to be divulged that he taught. Several of his students called him father. He was not without a sense of humor, and sometimes sought out the company of people who could make him laugh.

Among them he especially appreciated the painters Jacopo Torni, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Vasari himself, with whom he amused himself. He was sensitive to the qualified work of others, and even praised the work of old rivals like Raphael, but he often expressed his contempt for the mediocrity and pretentiousness of others.

He was an admirer among others of Donatello, Titian, Ghiberti and Bramante, and even of little-known artists such as Antonio Begarelli and Alessandro Cesari, in whom he found qualities invisible to others. Documents survive that attest to his generous and benevolent nature, but others partly confirm that folklore, including his own correspondence.

But it should be remembered that when dealing with an artist so different from his contemporaries, a person subjected to internal and external pressures unknown to most, he obviously did not possess the same nature as an ordinary man and he consequently could not behave like one.

Without going into an apologia for genius, his enormous talent, his visionary artistic ideas of titanic breadth, his dissatisfaction with ordinary achievement and his indefatigable capacity for accomplishment,

gifts that if on the one hand were universally recognized and attracted general admiration and amazement and earned him the epithet of divine, on the other hand in all likelihood separated him psychologically from the rest of humans, nor can one expect that such distinct universes could understand each other or coexist without major tensions.

It is very difficult to get an idea of the evolution of his personal wealth. He inherited land in Settignano and was able to make it much more productive than in his father's time, and even expanded his area. He owned a house-atelier in Rome, two houses and a studio in Florence, and is said to have had land in various places in Tuscany.

His major works were paid for regally, but often material costs, which were not low, were included. In addition, his patrons often paid him irregularly, on several occasions he did not receive full payment, and works such as the tomb of Julius II represented expense rather than gain for him. On the other hand, with his Spartan habits of life he made a good economy, and in a letter he said that Paul III had showered him with benefits.

He gave large sums to charity and supported his family when he could, and several times helped poor artists, including his two biographers. He did not trust banks and kept his money in a trunk under his bed. When he died, this chest contained ten thousand ducats of gold, a sum, according to Forcellino, enough to buy the Pitti Palace.

Love Life

Michelangelo never married, and today it is practically a consensus that he was homosexual, despite the denials of his early biographers. It has been suggested that the artist had concrete love affairs with several young men, such as Cecchino dei Bracci, for whom he designed the tomb, and Giovanni da Pistoia, whom he met while working on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and for whom he wrote some sonnets.

But no conclusive evidence has been found in this direction, and it is quite possible that Michelangelo himself, restraining his feelings and needs, eschewed a carnal consummation. Several factors may be considered to make the hypothesis plausible.

In his youth in Florence he had been deeply impressed by Girolamo Savonarola's preaching of renunciation of the world, and expressed his admiration for him throughout his life.

Secondly, consider the influence of the humanist-Neoplatonic vision of his time about love, another relevant element in his personal universe, which spoke of the body as the earthly prison, and although he accepted love between men and even encouraged it, he did not approve of physical contact, casting the experience of the feeling on a spiritual plane.

Moreover, public opinion about homosexuality in the 16th century was quite negative; in Florence homosexuals could be castrated or sentenced to death.

What comes through strongly in his poems is the perennial conflict between the impulse to earthly love and divine love, which, as he himself said, "kept him divided into two halves," and according to Harmon, from what is known about his life, there is no way to exclude either of the opposites in the study of his personality and his way of loving.

While repeatedly speaking of love directed toward people as the dynamic force that enabled him to transcend - "love urges and awakens us, it feathers our wings, and from that first stage,

with which the soul is not satisfied, at other times he declared his desire for physical intimacy, wanting to "embrace my so desired, my so sweet lord, with my unworthy arms," or imagining himself a silkworm to weave a precious robe "wrapping his beautiful breast with pleasure. Condivi recorded that "I have often heard Michelangelo discourse on the subject of love,

but I have never heard him speak anything other than Platonic love." Ryan and Ellis say, invoking other authors, that most modern historians recognize Michelangelo's homoerotic inclination, but the question of whether this led to a sexually active life remains an unknown.

Among men who occupied the greatest place in his thoughts was Tommaso dei Cavalieri, a patrician lover of the arts. At the time Cavalieri was a young man of 17 years of age, and Varchi, who also met him, said that he had a calm and unassuming temperament, a fine intelligence and education, and an incomparable beauty, and for such qualities he deserved the love of all who met him.

Soon after their first contact Michelangelo sent him two brief letters. In one of them he said:

"I realize now that I cannot forget your name any more than I can forget the food I live on - no! rather I could forget the food I live on, which unfortunately nourishes only the body, but not your name, which nourishes my soul and body, filling both with such delight that I become immune to sadness and fear of death, this while your memory lasts in me. Imagine if my eye were also doing its part (a reference to the physical distance between them) the state in which I would find myself!".

In another letter, to his friend Sebastiano del Piombo, he said:

"If you see him, I beg you to recommend him to me a thousand times, and when you write to me tell me something about him so that I have something to put in my mind, for if I forget him I believe that in the same instant I will drop dead."

For him Michelangelo wrote about forty poems, gave him drawings, and was the only one of whom he painted a portrait, a work unfortunately lost. Among the drawings he gave to Tommaso are a Kidnapping of Ganymede, the Fall of Phaeton, the Punishment of Tytus, and a Bacchanal of children, the subjects of which are suggestive.

Even though Cavalieri reciprocated the artist's love to a great extent and expressed it several times, including in letters, he does not seem to have been passionate, and would have cultivated it within the sphere of friendship, which according to Ryan was a source of much anguish and disappointment for Michelangelo.

However, in one of the letters that Tommaso sent to Michelangelo there is an ambiguous passage that reads: "...che Vostra Signoria torni presto, perché tornando liberarete me di prigione: perché io fuggo le male pratiche, e volendo fugirle non posso praticare altri che con voi". A direct translation is "...may Your Lordship return soon, because by returning you will free me from prison: for I flee from bad practices, and wanting to escape from them I cannot practice with anyone but you."

Frederick Hartt translated praticare as making love, but several dictionaries consulted make no association of praticare with making love, and translate it in the sense of befriending, frequenting, frequent visiting, and knowing, so that the interpretation of this passage remains doubtful.

What is certain is that their relationship developed into a solid loyalty, surviving some friction and the transformation of the young man into a father of a family, lasting until Michelangelo's death. 

The other figure of great importance in his personal life was Vittoria Colonna. Descended from a noble family, she was one of the most notable women in fifteenth-century Italy. While still young she married Ferdinand of Avalos, Marquis of Pescara.

She became the author of poetry praised as impeccable, one of the most important continuers of the tradition of Petrarch in her generation, a political mediator, a religious reformer, and her own merits were widely recognized even in her lifetime, but later historiography has unduly portrayed her more as a passive figure, in the shadow of the great men she knew, among them Michelangelo.

It is possible that they met around 1537, but their relationship only became closer around 1542 when Michelangelo was already elderly and she had been a widow for seventeen years. They discussed art and religion. For her Michelangelo wrote several poems and produced drawings, and she in turn also dedicated a series of poems to him.

Michelangelo's affection became intense, and in his sonnets he pondered whether this was not another fruitless passion, perhaps the most unhappy of all. Despite his doubts, the overall tone of his poems about her is calm and sweet, and he seeks sublimation most consistently through faith. Walter Pater has compared their relationship to that of Dante and Beatrice.

The faith that Michelangelo relied on to face the dilemmas of his feelings was that of the Counter-Reformation, which placed the responsibility for the solution of spiritual problems on one's inner strength rather than on saints, priests, indulgences and other external helpers common to previous generations.

On Vittoria's part, Abigail Brundin said that the poems she dedicated to her friend reveal the same effort to deal with this responsibility and to share the fruits of labor in the spirit of an evangelical communion with someone going through the same doubts and agitations of soul.

Michelangelo was present in her agony, and she passed away in his arms, while he in tears kissed her hands without ceasing. He later regretted not having dared to kiss her forehead and cheek. Condivi recorded that after Vittoria's death, Michelangelo spent a period upset, as if he had lost his reason. In a sonnet he expressed his sadness and anger, and said that nature had never made such a beautiful face.

Work of Michelangelo

Neoplatonism

Michelangelo lived throughout the last phase of the Renaissance and in the transition to Mannerism, a time of intense social conflict and profound changes in cultural life. As a young man he absorbed the lessons of the first Renaissance, which had established a series of technical and aesthetic canons for artistic representation.

These canons had been established on a strong tendency to recover in art and culture the classical tradition of antiquity, which had been developing since centuries before from a series of discoveries of texts by philosophers and other ancient writers, especially Hellenistic Neoplatonists and Roman orators, poets, politicians and historians, and from pieces of archeology.

With this amount of new information, the 15th century saw the consolidation of what was called Humanism, an eclectic synthesis of these pagan sources with Christian thought, also incorporating elements from Arabic, Oriental and Egyptian traditions, as well as others from magic, esoteric religious traditions, classical mythology and astrology.

The result was to put the human being back at the center of the universe, emphasizing his nobility, beauty, freedom, the powers of his intellect, and his divine nature. In art, a system of ideal proportions was created for architecture and for the representation of the body, and the system of perspective was crystallized for the definition of two-dimensional representation.

The Renaissance also associated classical idealism with an intense interest in the scientific study of the natural world, producing an art that was a universal generalization but able to dwell on the particular to describe individual characters.

At the same time, it was an art of an ethical nature, for it was considered to have a social function from which it could not escape, and aimed above all at healing souls and instructing the public in how to conduct their lives in the ways of virtue.

Michelangelo spent his youth in Florence when it was at the height of its political, economic, and especially cultural prestige, being a reference not only for Italy but for much of Europe. Shortly after, around 1500, Rome took the lead in all these aspects, where the popes strengthened their weakened temporal power, invoked for Rome the position of head of the world and heir to the Roman Empire, and proclaimed the universality of their religious authority.

This was the phase called the High Renaissance, when classical artistic ideas regarding harmony, balance, moderation, dignity, proportion, and fidelity to nature became especially influential. At this same time, Michelangelo reached his first artistic maturity and was already working for the popes in Rome, producing works that perfectly mirrored these conceptions.

Meanwhile, Italy was already under the sights of great foreign powers, and began to be invaded at various points. In 1527 Florence was placed under siege and Rome was the victim of a terrible sack by troops of the Holy Empire, while at the same time in Northern Europe the Protestants achieved their separation from the Roman Church with severe criticism of the doctrine and the abuses and corruption of the clergy.

Papal authority was seriously shaken, Italian political power on the international scene fell immediately, and a socio-cultural climate of uncertainty, tension and fear was established in Italy. The Church's reaction was to launch in the following years the Counter-Reformation, establishing a new formulation for doctrine and new rules for sacred art, where prior censorship with a clearly propagandistic orientation became a practice.

As Argan described it, in this period religion was no longer an uncontested revelation of eternal truths, but an individual quest; science was no longer established on the authority of the ancients, but on free research; politics changed its basis from a notion of hierarchy emanating from God to the search for an always provisional balance between contrasting forces;

History, as an experience already lived, had lost its determining value, what counted then was each person's experience in the present, and art left behind abstract and collective canons to plunge into the world of individual judgment, the investigation of the creative process itself, and the materiality of the work.

Thus, his last forty or fifty years or so, the greater part of Michelangelo's career, took place in this agitated environment, and his style of this phase must be characterized as mannerist, exhibiting traits typical of this school which he himself helped to found, namely:

a marked reaction to the balance and harmony of classicism and the idealization of the High Renaissance, the distortion of the proportions of the body, a tendency toward stylization of features, exaggeration and drama, the use of an unnatural color palette,

the annulment of central point perspective with the creation of a sense of several simultaneous, arbitrary, and irrational planes of space, and a preference for spiral, contorted, and bizarre forms, and for compositions crowded with characters.

Michelangelo distinguished himself from Renaissance aesthetics by abandoning the belief that Beauty is produced by a mathematical relationship of proportions between the parts of the whole, and relied instead on the senses.

He said that it is more necessary to have a compass in the eye than in the hands, because the hands produce the work, but it is the eye that judges it. He did not feel obliged to follow aprioristic aesthetic laws, saying that the artist should only be guided by the idea he conceived, and he considered it possible to define other proportions that were equally acceptable and beautiful.

His insistence on his own creative autonomy and the expression of his personal vision made him the first artist in the West to have princes and popes at his feet, decreeing for himself how the work should be realized, contrary to the practice before his generation, when the artist was a simple craftsman obedient to the will of his patrons.

This was both a recognition of his own ability and a response to the culture of the time that glorified personal fame. He shared with the Renaissance and his other contemporaries a love for the art of antiquity, but in his time the available models were mostly the product of Hellenism or the Roman era, which are not exactly idealistic and work more on the dramatic, dynamic, and emotional side of representation.

He was also stimulated in this direction by the discovery of an important Hellenistic work, the Group of Laocoon, which caused a sensation throughout the Roman intelligentsia at its public exhibition in the Vatican in 1508.

Despite his inclination toward Roman and Hellenistic models, Michelangelo appears as a great idealist, a direct heir to the universalism of the art of Greek High Classicism. The artist was no longer interested in observing nature beyond what was necessary to create a prototype form that ignored the particular and was applicable indiscriminately to all subjects.

Nothing in his art is specific beyond the general shape of the human body, and he transformed it into something whose power has been causing awe ever since he molded it into an image.

In the same high-classical tradition, he sought to express the heroic virtues of the soul through powerful bodies whose beauty is apotheotic and ideal rather than human, yet inevitably filtering ancient idealism through its eclectic interpretation by Renaissance Humanism, where the tragic and the pathetic also had a place.

As Weinberger noted, he did not represent his generation, but a generation of giants living outside of time, and the buildings he erected seem to have been intended for this race.

Even his small works have a monumental feature. He did not characterize the costumes or physiognomies of his time, he produced no portraits beyond a few drawings, his figures are not engaged in ordinary activities, no everyday utensils, no furniture, no architecture of the time appear; they do not seem affected by the seasons, by the surrounding landscape.

When there is some landscape, it is surprisingly deserted; it is just a conventional, abstract space where he distributed his superhuman characters. He had no other foundation for his art than the human body, the love for its beauty, and an idea of the sublime magnified to the extreme - once searching for marbles in Carrara he wished to transform an entire mountain into a statue of a giant.

Even his descriptions of sexual gender are ambiguous, in several of his paintings and sculptures the women are almost as muscular as his men and the only visible difference is the presence of breasts and absence of a penis. On the other hand, some of his male figures have a languor and postural affectation only found in the female representation of his time.

Even if in several images an androgynism is apparent, his preference for the male body is widely recognized, especially the nude one, which is the common thread throughout his artistic production, and abounds even in his sacred compositions.

The male nude appears since his first authenticated sculpture, the Centauromachia, in one of his earliest paintings, the Tondo Doni, and continues throughout his career, in the Bacchus, the David, the Christ the Redeemer, the Slaves and Captives, the Genius of Victory, the Young Man on his knees, and several other sculptures.

Such frequency since that time has provoked negative reactions in sectors of the Church, to the point that Pope Paul IV had the exposed genitalia of several figures in the Sistine frescoes covered, and the marble Christ the Redeemer suffered the same fate, receiving a bronze cloak.

His style and iconography in the last two centuries have been the subject of the most heated debate among critics and historians, so much so that Barolsky has ironically said that the copious bibliography produced on him is itself "Michelangeloesque," and although Michelangelo is generally counted in the highest esteem, little consensus on specific points could be achieved.

However, in his poetry he left many clues about his artistic ideas and about life, and in it, as has been suggested by writers such as Erwin Panofsky and Carlo Argan, Neoplatonism seems to exude as a predominant influence, in the way it was interpreted by Italian humanists and Christian poets such as Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Dante Alighieri, and Petrarch.

Martin Weinberger, of a formalist bent, rejected the transcendental explanation and pointed out that one cannot attribute with certainty to a definite school of thought ideas that belonged to Renaissance culture as a whole and were subject to a multiplicity of currents.

He also said that Michelangelo would hardly have placed his art above nature, and that his work requires study more within the realm of pure art - his treatment of materials, the evolution of his forms and his plastic language. It is possible that a synthesis of both views is the most adequate way to better understand his production.

In fact the interpretation of a specific piece can hardly be circumscribed to any individual source, but in general the transcendental explanation seems to remain the strongest tendency among critics to interpret his style and motivations as a whole.

It seems quite clear that for Michelangelo the search for transcendence was a driving force in all his work, as has been documented in various ways, but it was firmly inspired by the beauty he saw in the physical world, transformed by the power of Love resident in the soul into something, then yes, divine. In one poem he wrote:

"I see in your beautiful face, my Lord,
what I cannot express in this life.
The soul, still clothed in flesh,
with that so often is transported to God."

In another, he said:

"My eyes, seeking beautiful things,
and my soul, seeking salvation
have no other power to ascend to heaven
but by contemplating all that is beautiful.

On the other hand, one cannot attach too much weight to what he said about himself and his art, although his testimony can never be dismissed. As Barolsky reminded us, in the culture of the time artificialism and stylization were omnipresent. Even art was considered a delightful illusion, as Vasari said, and was subject to a series of conventions, in the public domain.

Sixteenth-century texts are loaded with purely rhetorical resources, and the social relationship in high places was something very close to a theater.

In the same way, biographies were deceptive laudatory pieces, and Michelangelo's poetic writings must be analyzed taking into account the context of this universe of conventions and artifice, in a process of conscious construction of his public image and his own myth that he took to a hyperbolic degree, modeling himself in the shape of a colossus, just as he did with his works.

Nor is his correspondence an exactly faithful source of information about his life; at many moments it is evasive, ambiguous, exaggerated, contradictory, and sometimes downright untruthful, which was not, incidentally, a characteristic that was unique to him, but mirrored a collective behavior. Epitomizing these customs, Machiavelli's The Prince was published in 1532.

Another aspect that has intrigued historians is the unfinished state of many of his works.

Often external factors, which have been documented, led him to this, being constantly called back and forth by popes and princes, but in other cases there was no known imperative that could justify it, and it is speculated today that the tensions between his grandiose ideas and the practical difficulty of transporting them satisfactorily into a concrete form limited by physical matter may have been an important element in this phenomenon.

The various techniques to which he devoted himself are discussed in more detail below, but given the quantity of his works, only the most important will be cited.

Sculpture

Michelangelo saw himself above all as a sculptor. He participated in the theoretical debate of the time about which of the arts was the noblest, the so-called paragone question, and sided with the sculptors. In a letter written to Benedetto Varchi he said:

"I believe that painting reaches its excellence only insofar as it approaches the effects of relief, while a relief is considered poor when it approaches the character of painting. I often think that sculpture is the beacon of painting, and that there is the same difference between the two as there is between the sun and the moon.

Yet I also consider both in essence the same thing, inasmuch as they both proceed from the same faculty, and hence it is easy to establish harmony between them and to put an end to disputes, which take more of our time than to produce the figures themselves. About that man (Leonardo da Vinci) who wrote saying that painting is more noble than sculpture, I think my maid knows more than he does.

For Michelangelo the sculptural process was a successive removal of the superfluous to expose the idea - the concetto - projected in the matter. In one of his poems he compared the process to the act of God taking man out of clay. Sometimes he made clay or wax models as preliminary studies.

His immediate influences were Roman sculpture, Giovanni Pisano, Niccolò dell'Arca, Jacopo della Quercia, Donatello, and also Leonardo da Vinci, but from the beginning he refrained from a strict fidelity to these models, seeking an individual approach, which is already visible in the Centauromachia he created for Lorenzo de' Medici, one of the most technically advanced compositions of his time.

There the myth is only a pretext, as Argan analyzed, for a research around pure movement. His first important work was Bacchus, strongly inspired by Hellenistic models. The formal solution is creative, an unbalanced and sensual figure that overturns classical solemnity and transforms it into an almost burlesque figure, in a continuous interpenetration of curves and polished surfaces that skillfully catch the light.

The contrast is provided by the small figure of the faun behind him, which serves as structural support and at the same time is treated with other textures and built from very distinct basic blocks.

Then, at the age of only twenty-three, he sculpted his famous Pietà, which has been praised from the beginning for its fine surface finish and its brilliant pyramid composition, a form of great stability and perfect for conveying the melancholic, resigned, and meditative pathos of the scene.

Christ appears in his mother's lap, with a peaceful face with no sign of suffering, as if asleep; his wounds are barely perceptible, which emphasizes the beauty of his body. The Virgin is a young girl, and looks more like a sister of Christ and not his mother, which was criticized by her contemporaries.

Their response was that her such perfect chastity would have preserved her beauty and youth.

The composition is interesting also because the figure of the Virgin, if she were standing, would be much larger than that of her son, a technical-illusionistic feature that is not noticed without a measurement, but provides with her body and the wide mantle full of folds a wide receptacle for the martyr's rest, and lends the whole an impression of tranquility.

The success of the work was enormous, and it was the only one Michelangelo signed.

Between 1501 and 1504 he created his largest sculpture, the colossal David for Florence. Using a single block of already partially worked marble, he had a fence erected around it and excavated it himself, without allowing visitors. When it was inaugurated it caused a sensation among Florentines.

Entirely naked, it is an image of triumph, in the tradition of the heroic nudes of classicism, but out of modesty a bronze garland was applied over his sex. Despite his outsized size, David is still a teenager, and was depicted in the preparatory moments of the fight with Goliath.

His expression is tense, his right hand crunches on his thigh, but there is no action, it is all about the concentration of energy anticipating the deadly moment. He is as much a symbol of the republican civility of Florence, as was immediately recognized, as of the glorious condition of man in Renaissance thought.

The tomb of Julius II was to have been his greatest work of sculpture, a large free-standing structure inside St. Peter's Basilica in the style of a mausoleum, 10 x 15 meters in area and adorned with 40 life-size statues representing prophets and personifications of the liberal arts, with a large statue of Julius 3 meters high crowning the whole.

Michelangelo was to receive an annual salary of 1,200 ducats - ten times what another artist would receive - plus a final payment of 10,000 ducats, a very significant sum. The marble was brought from Carrara and occupied ninety chariots.

So that the mausoleum could be installed in the Basilica, the Basilica had to be renovated, destroying the venerable previous construction erected by Constantine I between 326 and 333 AD, enlarging its floor plan considerably, and diverting most of Julius' resources there.

Thus, the work on the tomb came to a halt, Michelangelo had to pay for the transportation of the marble himself, complained to the Pope, and was expelled from the Vatican. Outraged, he left for Florence. The pope sent knights in pursuit but they only reached him near Florence.

Despite threats, he refused to return and sent the pope a letter protesting his mistreatment. A few months later, a reconciliation took place in Rome, and Julius asked him to sculpt a huge bronze statue of himself for the city of Bologna, and he was sent there, living in precarious accommodation, having to share a bed with two other helpers, whom he considered incompetent.

The first casting of the statue failed, and it had to be remelted, now successfully. It was 4 meters high and weighed 4.5 tons, one of the largest bronze works since antiquity, and was installed in 1508. When Bologna regained its independence the statue was destroyed.

With Julius' death in 1513 his tomb became more than ever a necessity, but his heirs were unwilling to proceed on the scale he had intended. One of Michelangelo's early sketches was revived and the monument was greatly reduced, the mortuary chamber replaced by a simple sarcophagus and the monument moved to next to a side wall, but there would still be several statues and reliefs.

Despite the dedication with which Michelangelo turned to the work, in the next three years only three statues had been begun, the Moses, and two others, of slaves, but they remained uncompleted. Between 1519 and 1520 he made an entirely nude Christ the Redeemer for the Church of Santa Maria on Minerva, inspired by the model of the heroic nude of classical antiquity.

It had been commissioned in 1514 by the Roman patrician Metello Vari, and work began thereafter, but halfway through Michelangelo discovered a black vein in the marble and abandoned the piece. A second version was quickly created to fulfill the contract, and the final polishing was given to his disciples. Years later its nudity was concealed.

When Leo X began his pontificate, the artist was asked to work in Florence. There, among several architectural projects, he sculpted from 1521 an important pair of tombs for two Medici dukes in the New Sacristy.

As it was already becoming a common experience for him, there were several interruptions and he could not finish them, he was called to Rome in 1526.

The statues of the dead are beautiful and noble, depicting them idealistically dressed as ancient Roman generals, but especially notable are those reclining on the sarcophagi. In the tomb of Julian, the allegories of Day and Night, and in that of Lorenzo, the Dawn and the Occasion, with a powerful anatomical description and intense pathos.

Four more statues of river deities were to have been carved, but were not even begun. When Michelangelo left, the monuments had not yet been assembled, and their final form was due to the assistance of some of his disciples, who finally arranged the tombs in 1545, in the form in which we see them today.

Michelangelo probably went back to work on Julius's tomb in 1526, producing four Captives, larger than the two Slaves, which were also unfinished but modernly are much appreciated for their powerful design and for the fact that they seem to be struggling in desperation to free themselves from the prison of amorphous matter around them, and Hartt even said that their emotional impact could hardly have been stronger if they had been finished.

A fourth project for the tomb of Julius II was designed in 1532, and formalized in contract with the family, in even smaller dimensions, and all the iconography was revised.

He created another statue at this time, the Genius of Victory, one of Michelangelo's most original compositions with his heavily contorted figure subduing a prisoner, although it is not guaranteed that it was intended for the tomb. This one, too, was not finished.

The work was only finished in 1545 after the pope intervened to release the artist from his obligations to Julius' family. And instead of being located in the Basilica, it was mounted in the Basilica of St. Peter in Chains.

The Moses, the only piece he completed entirely, and which was to be only a secondary figure in the original design, was installed in the center of the composition, surrounded by much less expressive statues hastily sculpted and completed by lesser sculptors, along with two more, the integral work of other artists.

Of interest still remain his final works, two pietàs. The first he began before 1555 as part of a project for a tomb of his own, which did not materialize. Halfway through the work he became exasperated with the "indocility of the stone" and partially destroyed what he had achieved.

His disciples tried to put it back together and finish some parts, but without much success, and one of Christ's legs was lost. What remains today is a sketch, still poignant, of Jesus' death, structured in such a way that it seems that the weight of his lifeless body is too great to be supported by the figures of Joseph of Arimathea, Mary Magdalene, and the Virgin Mary, lending the play an atmosphere of tragic dismay.

Another of the pietàs, the so-called Rondanini Pietà, was begun shortly before he died, and remains with only its forms suggested, but again its unfinished aspect, along with the sensitive conception of the whole, has great appeal to modern audiences.

Painting

The first painting that can be safely attributed to Michelangelo is the Tondo Doni (c. 1504), an image of the Holy Family. His treatment of spaces and volumes is clearly sculptural, with exact lines delineating the forms, and his iconography was interpreted by Charles de Tolnay as a summary of the evolution of the faith.

The Virgin and St. Joseph belong to the world of the Old Testament, ruled by the Law; Christ is the Good News, the world of Grace; St. John the Baptist is the connecting bridge between the two, and the nude gallery in the background would represent the pagan world.

The group is organized from the form of the pyramid combined with the spiral, the serpentine figure that became so dear to the Mannerists, and the treatment of the chromatic planes establishes sharp boundaries between them, without sfumato. His next work of importance would have been the never realized Battle of Cascina, but of which a copy of the preparatory drawing survives.

The scene chosen for representation was that of the warning of the arrival of the Pisan forces, taking the Florentines by surprise. Michelangelo again used a thematic pretext to make a remarkable study of the anatomy of human bodies, placing a large group of soldiers getting ready for battle in a multitude of positions.

Next came the commission for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a space of great symbolic significance in the Vatican because it is where papal elections are held. The Chapel was already decorated with a number of important frescoes on the walls, and Michelangelo's task was to decorate the ceiling, painted only in a blue dotted with stars.

Julius II's initial idea was for only twelve large figures of the Apostles, but Michelangelo designed a set of seven Apostles plus the five sibyls from Greco-Roman mythology, a rather unusual but not entirely unprecedented choice for a chapel ceiling.

He also added forty ancestors of Christ, a long series of scenes from Genesis, several nudes, and other ancillary figures, making up a group of three hundred figures divided into three groups: the Creation of the Earth by God, the Creation of Humanity and its fall, and finally Humanity represented by Noah. The figures display a strength and majesty unprecedented in Western painting.

The whole tone of the work is monumental, grandiloquent without being purely rhetorical, but possessing high poetry, inaugurating an entirely new way of representing the tragic, the heroic, and the sublime, as well as movement and the human body.

Its thematic interpretation has been the subject of intense debate from the moment of its public presentation, and many have compared it to a grand panorama of human evolution within a cosmic scope, in an understanding of the Old Testament as a preparation for the coming of Christ, or as a Neoplatonic interpretation of Biblical events from a particularly dramatic God-Man relationship perspective.

Michelangelo years later said that the conception of the iconography was due to him, but for someone who was neither highly erudite nor knew Latin, the symbolic complexity of the scenes seems beyond his ability to conceptualize.

Hartt said that it has been suggested that he had a theological advisor in devising the ceiling's thematic program in the person of Marco Vigerio della Rovere, a Franciscan relative of the pope. The scenes are composed without spatial relationship to each other or to the side figures, and the panel cannot be observed from a single point of view.

It is also interesting because it remains a document of the author's evolution in painting fresco on a monumental scale, a technique with which he was unfamiliar at the beginning of the work. He started from the figure of Noah over the entrance, and went on towards the altar.

The first figures reveal his inexperience and use more or less standard and not very dynamic formal models, and the scenes keep a relatively modest scale. But in a short time, as can be seen, he acquired confidence and resourcefulness, and recent studies have stated that as the work progressed he dispensed more and more with preparatory sketches on the definitive scale, until he discarded them completely, painting directly.

The same confidence is evident in the increasingly free treatment of the brushstrokes and in the growing dynamism and expressiveness of the figures, reaching dimensions of tragedy in some characters, which clearly illustrates the passage from the classical equilibrium of the High Renaissance to the bustling world of Mannerism.

The work was interrupted in the middle for about a year, when there were no funds to pay for it, and when it was resumed, curiously the same evolutionary process is observed from the second half, in the scene of Adam's creation, to the end in the figure of Jonah. There is a difference, however, in the second half, emphasizing the reflective atmospheres rather than the vital and exuberant anatomies.

Recently a restoration sponsored by a Japanese television company and carried out by a large team of specialists removed layers of candle soot, various dirt and possible previous restorations.

The choice of the person in charge of the work was to remove everything above the layer made in buon fresco, the pure fresco, painted when the base layer is still wet, so that when it dries the colors become permanently embedded in the plaster. The result was surprising, showing a bright and varied color palette, very different from that which for centuries was associated with Michelangelo's painting.

But the restoration raised a turbulent controversy in the art world. While one group of critics praised the result as a revelation, saying that it forced the reformulation of all previous assessments about its aesthetics, many other equally respected experts considered the intervention a calamity that destroyed his painting forever, accusing the restorers of removing,

in addition to the debris accumulated over the years, also additions by Michelangelo himself that would have been painted dry after the buon fresco had dried, which was actually quite a common practice in his time.

Comparing photographs from before and after, it seems clear that the adoption of a unified technical solution for the whole panel was indeed a reckless move, and that the restoration was too radical at least on some points, since it is hard to believe that the artist would, for example, have painted figures without eyes, as some of them are now.

Several other details have disappeared, such as ornamentation in the illusionistic architecture that frames the scenes, folds in the cloaks, and the subtle modeling of the bodies and shadows, resulting in flatter planes and annulling part of the sculptural effect of the painting.

However, in terms of colors, the luminous palette that emerged in the Sistine Chapel had a confirmation when restoring the Tondo Doni, which brings the same color spectrum.

Another composition of great importance was made in the same Sistine Chapel, the scene of the Last Judgment on the altar wall, painted between 1536 and 1541, commissioned by Paul III, a theme perfectly attuned to a time when the Counter-Reformation strongly exercised censorship and persecuted heterodox views of Christianity.

The composition is structured around the monumental figure of Christ the Judge, who separates the good from the bad. Unlike the previous tradition, which established this scene in rigidly compartmentalized levels and hierarchies, Michelangelo dissolved much of these boundaries, making the whole much more dynamic and unified.

The very distinction between the damned and the saved is minimized, and the saints themselves are for the most part stripped of clothing and conspicuous attributes, in a mass of naked bodies that spreads in motion across the surface. All this nudity immediately aroused severe criticism from the high clergy, and the panel was nearly destroyed.

To explain how a profusion of nudes could be painted in the Sistine Chapel, one of the Vatican's most important spaces, Crompton said that the two popes most strongly associated with it were rumored.

The Chapel's builder, Sixtus IV, was more than once accused of sodomy, and his inclination was confirmed by his own chamberlain. Julius II, who had the ceiling painted, had been condemned by the Council of Pisa as another "sodomite, covered with shameful ulcers. The council in truth served the political ends of his opponents, but other accounts speak of his attraction to young men.

His last noteworthy paintings were two large frescoes in the Vatican's Pauline Chapel. After the great freedom shown in the Judgment, both were conceived with more rigor and less dynamism, yet they are among his most expressive works for the powerful compactness of the groups and the dramatic intensity of the characterization of the characters.

The first represents the Conversion of Saul, made between 1542 and 1545, organized around the efficient diagonal between Christ in heaven and Saul hurled to the ground, blinded by the divine light, with a large horse figure at the center acting as the structural axis that balances the whole scene.

The second fresco depicts the Crucifixion of Peter, and was completed in 1550, the most compact of all Michelangelo's paintings, organized also on the diagonal formed by the cross being erected.

All sense of perspective was ignored, and Michelangelo reverted to the medieval usage of depicting what is farthest away in a higher position, with little distinction of proportions between the foreground and the receding planes. The scene is essentially static, with little action, but has a poignant ritualistic quality.

Architecture

Vasari said that the architects of the 15th century had brought architecture to a high level, but lacked one element that prevented them from achieving perfection - freedom.

Describing architecture as a system of set rules, he declared that new buildings should follow the example of the old classical masters, keeping the whole in good order and avoiding mixing disparate elements. In this line of ideas, he added that creative freedom, although falling outside some rules, was not incompatible with order and correctness, and had the advantage of being guided by the creator's own judgment.

Michelangelo was considered by Vasari to be the only one of the masters of his generation to achieve this desired freedom, and whose personal and individualistic engagement in all his activities, unusual at a time when collective work was the rule, opened the way for other architects to produce increasingly personalistic works, seeking to solve the problems of construction within the sphere of architecture itself without the old tutelage of the literati, the treatise writers, and the intellectuals, and with a new sense of professionalism.

This did not prevent, however, that classical elements continued to be employed, but in an eclectic and experimental approach, and adapting to new concepts of habitability, function, and comfort.

His first architectural work was the design of a new façade for the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence, executed at the request of Leo X in 1515. The plan has two floors of equal importance, structured in two side blocks symmetrically arranged around a central block crowned by a pediment, within the classical scheme.

The project was abandoned without being realized. His next project was the Basilica's New Sacristy, conceived in the tradition of Brunelleschi, installing a dome supported on pendants over a cubic volume, with walls covered in stucco interspersed with stone sections.

The internal decoration was also his, creating architecturally shaped tombs for two Medici princes on the side walls and applying simply decorative architectural elements that subvert their primitive functions, such as empty tabernacles over the doors, blind windows, and pilasters without capitals.

The Laurentian Library, also attached to the Basilica, is similarly innovative, especially the vestibule space, whose verticality is at all unusual. It also makes use of architectural elements detached from their function, such as the blind windows and baseless pilasters resting only on consoles, as well as grouping the elements very compactly.

The most remarkable piece in the lobby is the staircase, treated in a sculptural manner as a volume of great independence in relation to the structure of the building. The rooms for book storage and reading are conventional, large, and spacious in the tradition of medieval conventual libraries, demonstrating an understanding of the functional needs of the space.

In 1534, with these projects still in progress, Michelangelo moved to Rome. There his first project was the remodeling of the square on Capitoline Hill, which since the sack of Rome in 1527 had been in ruins.

Pope Paul III had recently installed an important Roman relic, the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, in the center of the square, and Michelangelo was commissioned to provide an urban setting for it, in a work that had great civic importance. Michelangelo found the area already occupied by two ruined palaces arranged at an arbitrary angle, with another at the back of the square.

He took advantage of the original arrangement of the palaces and created a trapezoidal intermediate space, in the center of which the statue was placed, arranging the volumes and voids in a symmetrical way. The palaces were restored and their facades redesigned, with a different design for the back one and twin facades for the sides.

For the entrance to the square Michelangelo designed a monumental ramp-staircase, connecting the hilltop with the city level. The result of the whole was brilliant. He did not get to see the project completed but his continuators followed the design he left.

His most ambitious work in architecture was his participation in the renovation of St. Peter's Basilica. He used as a basis the design developed by Bramante, whom he considered to be of a high standard, and, like him, preferred the Greek cross plan as the most suitable for a church.

Even on this ground his obsession with the human form becomes evident; he thought that the building was comparable to a human body, meaning to organize its parts around a central axis, just as limbs are organized around the trunk. He said that those who did not master the form of the body would not be able to understand architecture.

His modifications to the Bramantine design were the compacting of the whole, eliminating the scheme of several interconnected crosses and structuring the plan on a single large cross, with a double colonnade entrance supporting a classical pediment.

The current configuration of the Basilica, however, is in Latin cross, having been remodeled in later years. Its treatment of the facades also reveals its tendency to give more unity and coherence to the whole, establishing a series of external pilasters in colossal order, which cross two floors and interconnect them powerfully without interrupting the fluency of the horizontal development.

This idea had been sketched by Leon Battista Alberti in a church in Mantua, but Michelangelo brought it to its logical conclusion and on a monumental scale, becoming a model for the architects of Mannerism and the Baroque. Another important contribution to the building was the design of its dome.

He planned at first an ogival dome, like the one in Florence Cathedral, but later redesigned it in a hemispherical shape to compensate for the verticality of the lower block and to create a dialogue between static and dynamic elements.

However, he did not see the dome built, and when it was his second design was discarded and Giacomo della Porta reverted the project to its primitive conception, judging it, with good reason, more stable and easier to build. Yet it is still a creation of Michelangelo, and one of the most important of its kind in the whole world, and is also a model for future generations.

Drawing

Most of Michelangelo's drawings that survive are preparatory sketches for his works in sculpture and painting. Nevertheless, they possess qualities that make them works of art in their own right, and demonstrate a consummate skill in the treatment of form, light effects, and the depiction of anatomy and movement.

He was able to achieve effects of volume many times with the simple control of the thickness of the stroke. The study of his drawings sheds valuable light on his creative process and the changes in the conception of a work, and there are several of them that have never been transported to other formats, remaining as unique testimonies of a given idea.

But not all of them were conceived as studies, he gifted his friends several times with finished works, and made some portraits, which indicates that he considered this technique as an autonomous territory of art. He valued them highly, and guarded them jealously.

His mastery of drawing was emphasized when he taught his few students, recommending that they practice it endlessly, often providing drawings of himself for them to copy. Drawing also served him as a means of spreading his ideas, and after 1550 he made several to be carried over into painting by other artists.

Vasari said that shortly before he died Michelangelo burned a large number of his drawings and sketches, so that no one could see the way he developed his work and tested his genius, so that his public image would appear no less than perfect. With this the remaining collection is relatively small, and the pieces that escaped destruction were highly coveted by collectors.

His own nephew Lionardo had to fork out a hefty sum when he wanted to acquire some on the Roman art market. Most of them, about two hundred, are preserved in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence as a legacy from his descendants. Due to overexposure to light and poor environmental conditions over the centuries, much of the collection suffered serious damage, but they were restored in the 1970s.

Poetry

In Alma Altizer's opinion, Michelangelo was an extraordinary poet, and in his best moments was able to express a powerful unity of vision that makes them at once rustic and sophisticated, archaic and contemporary, obscure and crystalline clear. He sought with them to be able to express "the inner movements of his soul".

For the researcher, his strength derives from his ability to condense in the few verses of his favorite forms, the sonnet and the madrigal, a wide range of meanings and a rich plethora of poetic images, penetrating deep into the dialectics inherent to human life.

In the nearly three hundred poems and fragments that have come down to us today, there is a recurrent exploration of antitheses - imagination and reality, creation and destruction, subject and object, spirit and matter, lover and beloved, pain and pleasure, inner and outer life, beauty and ugliness, life and death.

His early works are often unfinished, conventional and derivative of Dante Alighieri and Petrarch, and also of scholastic philosophy in its way of dealing with moral and religious paradoxes, but over the years he developed an original synthetic technique that enabled him to handle antitheses on several simultaneous planes.

Girardi pointed out as other characteristics of his poetry a tendency to abstract and internalize the images and formal expressions he inherited from his models, a refusal to use concepts in a simply ornamental way as an end in themselves, and an ability to avoid circumlocutions and go directly to the desired point, which lends them great persuasive force and animates them as images of a true experience. 

For Altizer this poem exemplifies the best of Michelangelo's output. The use of words in their archaic Tuscan form, such as fora, foco, volta, opra, fratta, tragge, reinforces the timelessness of the concept that love is a force both creative and destructive, and that the production of a work of art of silver or gold, signifying its high quality, often requires the sacrifice of the artist, who breaks into pieces to bring it to light.

It also condenses in a few lines the relationship of art to love and the insatiable desire for infinite beauty, and the notion that the artist's soul is incomplete without the presence of his muse.

This condensation is made possible by the use of compact, inverted, or interpolated syntactic forms, and by the choice of a few key words that themselves carry along a number of associated concepts. Despite his high qualities, most of his poetic work was written only for himself and a small circle of friends.

Several poems were recorded on fragments of paper, or in the midst of other writings, as if they were parallel thoughts that he picked up in passing. He once thought of publishing about a hundred of them, but his editor died before he finished the work and he did not return to the project, but some appeared in public without his consent, and were considered precious works. Berni praised him with a terzetto where he said:

"Hush all you pale violets,
and liquid crystals, and stony beasts:
he speaks things, and you speak only words."

Benedetto Varchi in the funeral tributes to Michelangelo equated his poetry with his achievements in the other fields of art. Still, this appreciation was not widespread, and only in 1623 did a collection appear, the work of his great-nephew Michelangelo the Younger, but largely corrected, updating the language and purging it of homoerotic allusions and statements considered unacceptable to morals and religion.

This edition was the only one available until the 19th century, when the editor's tampering was largely removed and the poems restored to a form fairly close to the original. Interest at this point was already significant, but its translation into other languages was considered extremely difficult.

A complete edition was only achieved by Cesare Guasti in 1863, but it suffered from serious editorial problems. In 1897 Carl Frey offered the first truly scholarly work of editing, catapulting Michelangelo's poetic production to a much higher level of public attention, becoming canonical for some sixty years, although it still had some deficiencies.

In 1960 Enzo Girardi published another, much superior, complete edition, offering a version in modern Italian alongside a restored version that became a reference, and providing a chronological ordering based on the evolution of Michelangelo's calligraphy, which made it possible to study the subject in relation to his artistic evolution as a whole and to the events of his personal life.

The picture formed from this is that he did not start writing until after 1503, producing fourteen poems until 1520.

From this date to 1531, thirty or forty more, and between 1532 and 1547, about two hundred, divided into three groups: the first addressed to Tommaso dei Cavalieri, expressing an intensity of love that made its addressee the epitome of everything good that could be in the world, uniting in an unparalleled way the beauty of body and spirit; the second, addressed to Vittoria Colonna, equally intense affectively but more inclined to religiosity;

and a group for an unknown addressee, the beautiful and cruel lady, possibly a symbolic figure rather than a real person, dealing with varied themes unrelated to love.

The last phase is the most eclectic, and can only be grouped by chronology, but a common theme is religion, expressing her desire for peace and forgiveness for her sins. After Girardi's contribution the editions and translations multiplied, and by the end of the 20th century only five complete editions appeared in English.

However, in Italy itself he is far from unanimous among critics, and important names such as Benedetto Croce and Giuseppe Toffanin considered his poetry poor, unoriginal and seriously flawed.

Interestingly the author himself wrote comments alongside several poems denigrating their merit, but he did not extend this opinion to the whole of his poetic work, and wrote to Jacob Arcadelt thanking him for having set one of them to music, and to Varchi for a highly laudatory lecture he had delivered in Florence on this facet of his career; moreover, as stated before, he at least once intended to publish a substantial collection.

His poems have been set to music several times throughout history, by composers such as Costanzo Festa, Bartolomeo Tromboncino, Jacob Arcadelt Dmitri Shostakovitch, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Benjamin Britten.

Correspondence

Michelangelo was an assiduous correspondent; nearly five hundred of the countless letters he wrote to many different recipients survive, although these were primarily his family members, friends, agents, and patrons. They are a most relevant source for forming a more complete picture of his life, personality, and work.

In several of them we find examples of his poetry, and in his prose they exhibit, according to George Bull, a robust and fluent Tuscan dialect, capable of moving between a rich and flowery language and direct and objective assertions, often harshly critical, expressing a lively and complex imagination, an ambivalent position on various things, and a refined and passionate sensitivity, often colored by a fine sense of humor, but sometimes bordering on the grotesque.

He often dealt with central themes of human life - death, religion, love, and ambition. He used many very vivid metaphors and his skill with wordplay was great. Here follows a letter to Tommaso dei Cavalieri in December 1532:

"Impulsively, my dear lord Tommaso, I am impelled to write to your lordship, not in answer to any letter of yours which I have received, but rather because I am walking like the half-dried plants at the edge of a thin stream, which for little water suffer manifestly.

But after I left the beach I did not find small streams, but the deep ocean where you appeared, so much so that, if I could, not to be submerged at all, I would voluntarily return to the beach from which I first left.

But since I am here, we will make stone of the heart and follow; and if I do not have the art of navigating the waves of the sea of your valiant genius, you will excuse me, nor will you disdain what I tell you, nor want to give me what I do not possess: for he who is always solitary, can never have company.

But Your Lordship, the only light of our century, cannot be satisfied with the work of others, having neither fellow men nor anyone like you. But if among my things, which I hope and promise to do, any will please you, I will say it much more fortunate than good; and when I am sure to please Your Lordship in something, as I said, the present time, with all that comes through me,

I will put into it, and it grieves me too much not to be able to take back the past, for then I could serve you much longer than only possessing the future, which will be brief, for I am already too old. You don't have to tell me anything. Read the heart and not the word, for the pen is not faithful to good will.

Oh, forgive me if I have been astonished by your pilgrim genius before, for I know how wrong I have acted; for it is natural to marvel that God works miracles, just as it is to marvel that Rome produces divine men. And of this the universe is witness."
Another letter, written to his brother Lionardo in August 1541:

"Lionardo, you write me that you are coming to Rome this September with Guicciardino. I tell you that this is not a good time, for you would do nothing but increase my worries, in addition to the ones I already have. And I say this also to Michele, because I am so busy that I have no time to waste with you, and all the other little things bore me too much:

that is the only reason I am writing to you. You have to prepare for Lent, I will send you money so that you get well, so that you don't arrive here like a beast. I have also written to Michele, and advise him that he too should get ready to have a good Lent, because I will be relieved; but perhaps there is something he needs to do in Rome in September.

That I don't know, but if that is not the case, again I advise you not to come before this Lent, because in September I won't have time anyway to talk to you, especially since the Urbino who is with me goes to Urbino in September and leaves me here alone with so much to do.

But I will not lack someone to provide for my food! Read this letter to Michele and ask her to prepare for this Lent as I said. And go practice your writing!, which seems to me that you get worse every day."

Michelangelo's Legacy and critical fortune

Michelangelo was repeatedly disputed by various cities, which tried to entice him with large pensions to settle among them. Even the sultan of Turkey wished to have him at his court. The Gondi bankers of Florence made available to him whatever sums he desired.

The King of France, Francis I, offered him 3,000 crowns to settle there, and the Signoria of Venice, a pension of 600 crowns for life and complete freedom of action. He was highly esteemed by all his patrons; even the turbulent Julius II, with whom he quarreled many times, showed him warm affection.

Julius III, though he did not employ him for any definite task in consideration of his advanced age, constantly sought his advice and was so considerate as to say that he would give his blood and years of his life to prolong Michelangelo's, always wanted him to sit by his side, and made way when he passed.

For his contemporaries and immediate successors, the visual influence of his art was relatively small and cannot be compared to the influence of his personality as a great creator, nor does it bear a direct relation to the fame achieved by his greatest works, possibly because his formal model was considered too grandiose and sublime, and therefore inhibiting the formation of a true school.

The cases where a direct influence was noted were few and reveal an almost complete dependence on the master, as was that of Daniele da Volterra, the most talented among his disciples. However, in limited aspects he continued for a long time to be considered a model, especially in the field of anatomical drawing.

In sculpture he contributed to crystallize the form of the serpentinate figure, which had a great penetration among the Mannerists, and important Baroque artists such as Rubens, Borromini, Titian, Tintoretto and Bernini owe something to his conceptions.

In the 19th century Rodin was also sensitive to his treatment of volumes and surfaces. In architecture his work also had a fertilizing impact on the creators of the next generation, opening a path for free and individual experimentation from the orthodox classical patterns.

Michelangelo was the first Western artist to consistently claim his creative independence, and the prestige he enjoyed in life, making him an enlightened one, a being touched by the divine, triggered a process of reversing the hierarchies of the art production and consumption system that culminated in the Romantic vision of the artist as an isolated genius,

misunderstood, semi-illusioned, concerned only with self-expression, tormented by unsatisfied longings for the infinite, ahead of his time, pursued by insensitive philistines, and absolutely free of social or moral obligations to his audience.

The first substantial analyses of Michelangelo's work appeared in the two biographies that were written about him while he was still alive, although they cannot strictly be said to be criticisms; rather they are effusive praise of his talent and personal character.

The first was included in Giorgio Vasari's biographical compendium, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550). The text begins by saying that "the benign Regent of Heaven, seeing how fruitlessly artists strove to perfect art, decided to send to earth a genius who alone could bring them all to consummate perfection.

Even with all the praise, Michelangelo, upon reading the work, was not entirely satisfied. So his disciple Ascanio Condivi in 1553 wrote his Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, which contains data provided by the artist himself, but even this version of his story was not considered at all faithful, and contains many important factual errors.

But the tone of the narrative is the same as Vasari's. For example, when describing the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, he said that everything possible was there with the human form. On the other hand, it has a lot of valuable information, and was used as one of Vasari's sources for his second edition of the Lives of 1568, which became a canonical text about him, but did not fail to criticize various aspects of his colleague's work.

These studies strove to create a public image of Michelangelo from a heroic, divinized, exemplary perspective, erase character defects that were notorious to the artist's other contemporaries, and even peremptorily deny rumors that he was homosexual; Condivi went so far as to assure that he was as chaste as a monk.

The praises for him in his time were countless, and in addition to what Vasari and Condivi said, let us add a few more by way of illustration: Benedetto Varchi said that his incomparable talent would be recognized even among the barbarians; Perino del Vaga called him the god of drawing; Ariosto said that he was beyond mortals, and even Raphael Sanzio, who had been his rival, said that he thanked God for having been born in Michelangelo's time.

Similar expressions were often found in the following centuries. Goethe, after seeing the Sistine Chapel, said that he no longer took pleasure in observing nature, because he no longer found in it the grandeur with which Michelangelo had portrayed it;

he was an influence on Winckelmann in his conceptualization of Neoclassicism, considering him one of the few modern artists to equal the achievements of the ancient Greeks; he was a paradigm for all Romantic artists because of the autobiographical character of his work, his passion and ambition;

Yeats praised his ability to imitate nature and saw his work as a confirmation of his own inclinations to value physical life; Freud said that no other work of art had impressed him as much as Moses, gave a psychological interpretation to it by relating it to authority figures and the force of righteous indignation, and saw in its patriarchal idealism a concrete expression of the highest possible intellectual achievement for mankind.

He was admired even by artists of the 20th century iconoclastic avant-garde, such as Henry Moore, who called him superhuman.

 Despite the modern trend to study art within an academic perspective that has much of the rationalism and objectivity of science, bombastic expressions to describe his life and work are still common in recent times.

As an example, Sir Kenneth Clark said that Michelangelo was one of the greatest events in the history of Western man, and André Malraux called him the inventor of the Hero.

Antonio Paolucci considered this phenomenon as virtually impossible to avoid, given the enormous pressure in this direction exerted by the continuous reiteration of an uncritical and unconditional deification process over centuries, to an extent that no other artist has experienced. Quite clearly, he was the first great modern artist, and remains the prototype of the concept of genius to this day.

In culture

Michelangelo was one of the few artists in the learned world who could penetrate popular culture and create a folklore about himself. He named a number of people, educational establishments, companies and commercial products of various kinds, including a bionic hand.

He is the name of a computer virus, a major ocean liner, an asteroid, a crater on the planet Mercury, one of the Ninja Turtles, and his figure has been portrayed in movies, with the film The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), directed by Carol Reed and with Charlton Heston in the role of the artist, being considered a classic.