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Michelagniolodi
Lodovico di Lionardo di Buonarroti Simone was born March
6, 1475 in Caprese in Tuscany. He attended Latin School and then studied
painting in the workshop of the Ghirlandaio brothers and sculpture
with Bertoldo, a formal pupil of Donatello. Michelangelo's early training
derived from the great Florentine masters of the Low Renaissance:
Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, and Signorelli. |
A true Renaissance
man, he was gifted as a painter, a sculptor, an architect, an engineer,
and a poet, but his preference was for sculpture with its plastic
possibilities for the revelation and exaltation of the human body.
By the time he was fifteen, Michelangelo had attracted the attention
of Lorenzo de'Medici and was invited to join the scholars, writers
and artists who frequented the Medici palace. This early experience
and exposure to Neoplatonic thought influenced his ideal and concepts
throughout his life. Michelangelo began as a sculptor and made his
first statues between 1496 and 1501 in Rome. The high point of Michelangelo's
early style is the gigantic (14.24 ft) marble David , which
he produced between 1501 and 1504.
Michelangelo's life coincided with a period of enormous papal power,
and from 1505, when he signed the contract for the tomb of Pope Julius,
he was subject to political pressures, wars, papal orders and counter
orders. His greatest painting, the decoration of the Sistine Chapel
was painted single-handedly between 1508 and 1512. The awe-inspiring
work represents scenes of the Creation and the Old Testament through
the story of Noah, and begins with Adam receiving the spark of divine
life from God. In 1537, Michelangelo began his Last Judgment,
the fresco on the far wall of the chapel. Here sculptural and architectural
vision is replaced by swirling; space and more pictorial representation
of tortured humans corresponding to the artist's own unhappiness,
frustrations, and increasing religious doubts. In this and in his
last paintings (1541-50), for the Paolino Chapel, he was no longer
the exponent of classicism but the forerunner of the Mannerist School.
Michelangelo's genius influenced Raphael, whose work sums up the best
of the classical Renaissance, and then Correggio, Tintoretto, and
countless other painters who have succeeded him through the centuries.
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