Michelangelo spent months, years up here in the mountains of the Apuans, in the dazzling
sunlight reflected off the rocks, looking at the marble still in the quarry's womb,
trying to make out the figure imprisoned in the block of stone.
He could almost hear its voice, feel the energy waiting to be freed, and concluded that an
excellent artist has no concept that marble does not contain within itself, and at which
arrives only the hand that obeys the intellect.
Michelangelo is born on March the 6th, 1475.
He first sees the light of day in a country house in Caprese, in the upper Tiber Valley,
where his father has been sent by the Florentine Republic to serve as temporary mayor.
A few days later the family makes its return to the hills of Florence, to Setignano.
Michelangelo is entrusted to a wet nurse, who is the daughter of a stonemason and the
wife of another, and his whole life long he will recall that he was nursed on marble dust
as well as milk.
Michelangelo is brought up in a respectable Florentine family, always under the severe
control of his father, who is certainly not enthusiastic about his son's inclination for
drawing.
Michelangelo is a stubborn, passionate lad.
These are the exciting years of Lorenzo the Magnificent, of the marvellous Medici Gardens,
transformed into a meeting place for men of letters, philosophers, artists, and humanists
like Pico della Mirandola, Angelo Poliziano, and Marsilio Ficino, men fascinated by the
myth of classical antiquity.
In 1488, at the age of 13, Michelangelo enters the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, who
is then at work on his masterpiece, the frescoes of Santa Maria Novella.
But Michelangelo does not let himself be drawn by Ghirlandaio's decorative sensibility.
Instead, he studies the great masters of closed form and volume, Giotto, Massaccio, Donatello.
Michelangelo's mind is made up.
He is going to be a sculptor.
So he carves his first two base reliefs.
The Battle of the Centaurs has a theme and tone of a classic base relief, but the entwining
of the bodies, the controlled but energetic gestures of the figures, the extraordinary
handling of the relief and the degree of finishing of the details, are the first signs of an
overpowering genius.
The Madonna of the Stairs is an exercise in Donatello Stiacciato, the slab sculpted in
very low relief.
The contrast between the classic profile of the Madonna and the Herculean child inaugurates
a tender, painful thread that runs throughout the art and psychology of Michelangelo, his
mother's death when he was only five.
The passing of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1492 coincides with the end of a very felicitous
period for art in Florence.
Michelangelo begins to travel and makes his first trip to Rome.
His first large marble statue, Bacchus, is created in this classical climate.
Bacchus sways, inebriated by the wine.
The young Michelangelo ironically juxtaposes the smooth tapered body and the god's vacuous
expression, while a wily satyr climbs along one of his legs to nibble at the grapes.
The Bacchus is a success, and Michelangelo returns to the quarries.
He has to choose a special block, one of extremely pure marble.
At the age of 23, he has a crucial commission, a pietà, to be located in St. Peter's Basilica.
Michelangelo uses a German scheme, a Madonna seated with the dead Christ across her lap,
but with a fineness of modeling, an absolute consistency in the relations between the figures,
and a perfect softness in the folds of the drapery.
A crystalline purity in the marble approaches sublime heights.
St. Peter's pietà will remain the only work signed by the master.
We are in the year 1500.
Michelangelo is now a famous artist, and history begins to make its claims on him.
On August 16, 1501, the Florentine government asks him to carve a gigantic statue of David,
and this time he is not allowed to choose his material at the quarries.
He has assigned a block of marble that has already been worked on and discarded.
The David soon becomes the very symbol of the Florentine Republic, proud, independent,
ready to fight against its enemies.
Completed in 1504, the statue marks a turning point in Michelangelo's style.
For the first time, the sculptor expresses that sense of the terrible, the stark vitality
that will become characteristic of his art.
The suppressed anger, the intellectual control that curbs the physical aggressiveness, the
darting gaze, the quivering muscles, the limbs apparently relaxed but ready to spring.
This David is a youth who suddenly becomes a man, a hero, a defender of his people, reminding
us of an illustrious precedent, Donatello's St. George.
1504 is a very eventful year for Michelangelo, who is on the verge of thirty.
In particular, the master is faced with the problems of composing in a tondo, the circular
frame dear to the Florentine tradition.
The marble Pitti Madonna is a fascinating anticipation of Michelangelo's use of the
unfinished.
The background of the composition is deliberately left rough-hewn to create atmospheric effects
similar to those achieved in painting by Leonardo da Vinci.
In his paintings, however, Michelangelo forcefully opposes Leonardo's sfumato.
The Doni Madonna is the only panel painting by Michelangelo that has reached us fully
intact.
The clear, cool, bright colors, the sharp drawing around the figures, the closely packed
monumental composition are the complete opposite of Leonardo's style.
Mary, Joseph, and the child are bound in a tight knot of gesture and feeling.
In painting, as well as sculpture, Michelangelo asserts his own conception of art.
The image is obtained by removing, by making the figures emerge from the background or
the marble, and not by putting, with successive coats of pigment or additions, as Leonardo
did.
The Doni Madonna is a completely new style of painting that marks a turning point in
Renaissance art and opens the way to the researches and doubts of the mannerists.
In 1505, Michelangelo passes another long period at the quarries of Carrara, where he
selects the blocks of marble needed for executing the monumental tomb commissioned by the ambitious
Pope Julius II, an energetic pontiff intent on renewal.
The first design was for no less than 40 marble statues, but Michelangelo gradually has to
scale it down in an extenuating process that does not come to an end until decades later.
It is the start of what Michelangelo will call the tragedy of the tomb.
Contested between the Pope and the Florentine Republic, Michelangelo is engaged in a direct
challenge with Leonardo in 1506.
The two great masters are called to produce huge frescoes to decorate the walls of the
main hall of the Palazzo Vecchio.
Although they make careful drawings and cartoons, neither Michelangelo nor Leonardo is able
to carry the work to completion.
But Michelangelo's studies for the Battle of Cascina, here in a copy by Bastiano da Sangallo,
will be much imitated in the centuries to come.
It is 1508, and Pope Julian II won't take no for an answer.
He wants the best artists of his times in Rome.
He is an impossible man, slow to pay, obstinate and vain, but exceptionally able.
Despite protests by Michelangelo, who feels he is a sculptor, Julius sets him a daunting
task, frescoing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the most important part of the Vatican,
the site of Christendom's most solemn ceremonies.
Reluctant, eternally dissatisfied, Michelangelo begins the project that will undermine his
health and earn him universal glory.
For four and a half years, Michelangelo toils on the scaffolds, often flat on his back.
He gets scoliosis, arthritis, an eye infection from the paint dripping in his face.
But in the meantime, he is producing a sublime work of art, starting with the generations
of the ancestors of Christ on the lunettes over the windows, then four great deeds of
the Old Testament at the corners of the vault.
He composes a monumental structure of images and false architecture that is both complex
and organic.
Each figure is carefully studied in preliminary sketches and drawings, but Michelangelo never
loses sight of the overall compositional effect, which remains the most impressive aspect
of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
The bond is mainly the strong, clear, bright colors, returned to their full brightness
and energy by the recent restorations.
In the central part, powerful figures of prophets and symbols surround the scenes from Genesis.
The strength and sweetness that emanate from the characters flow without interruption.
Each face is an admirable portrait.
Each movement shows the hand of a genius.
Michelangelo's hardships and the ailments that afflict him are listed in a sonnet, apparently
droll but very bitter.
At the end of which, the artist says, he does not feel he is in a good place, nor a painter.
And once again, Michelangelo finds himself competing with another great artist of his
day.
Raphael is now at work in the Vatican as well, frescoing the nearby stanza della segnatura.
In the episodes from Genesis, Michelangelo again returns to the register of the terrible.
The irresistible will and power of Almighty God dominates the vault, the composition reaching
The Creator passes from frame to frame, flying over the spaces of the ceiling.
Every gesture is an order, every instant an explosion of force that culminates in the
creation of Adam.
In the cosmic spark that crosses the space, at once brief and boundless, separating the
finger of God from that of the first man.
A few months after the work on the Sistine Chapel is completed, Julius dies and his heirs
significantly reduce the funds for executing the Pope's tomb.
The difficulties are enormous, the project continues to be downscaled.
Michelangelo is furious.
His return to Carrara to select new blocks of marble allows him to recover his strength
and devote himself to achieving another masterpiece, the statue of Moses.
The patriarch seems to summon all his psychic and intellectual energies to reign in his
bursting emotions, his explosive physicality, his fit of rage.
It is clearly an autobiographical reflex.
Michelangelo pours his frustration and unexpressed desires into his subjects.
Julius II's successor is Leo X, a Florentine, the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
A completely different person from his intractable driven predecessor, Leo X presents himself
as the Pope of peace and reconciliation.
A man of superior culture and sophisticated artistic taste, he engages Michelangelo in
a series of projects linked to the Medici dynasty and their favorite Basilica of San
Lorenzo.
In 1516, the master is called to design the facade of the great church and to finish a
block begun by Brunelleschi.
Michelangelo immediately builds a wooden model to lend concreteness to his ideas.
Resembling a palace more than a church, the facade of San Lorenzo represents a sharp break
from the 15th century patterns, a strong rhythmic body in which much space is dedicated to sculpture.
Michelangelo selects his marble in the quarries of Pietrasanta, but the Pope makes him use
marble from Seravezza.
The costs rise, the delays accumulate, the pontiff's interests shift elsewhere.
San Lorenzo will remain without a facade.
The premature deaths of two members of the Medici family in 1519 is an occasion for the
Pope to ask Michelangelo to design a new family funeral chapel next to the church of San Lorenzo.
The challenge is an exciting one.
Michelangelo creates an organic, dramatic environment marked by the lines of blue-gray
sandstone that stand out sharply on the walls.
The tombs are not simply placed against the side walls, but are part of them in a direct,
dynamic, tense relationship with the architectural framework.
The work drags on for many years, and Michelangelo's design will be realized only in part.
It is a decisive masterpiece nevertheless, a passionate and terrible encounter between
architecture and sculpture.
In an innovative choice, Michelangelo conceives the commemorative portraits of the dead dukes
Giuliano and Lorenzo in antithetical poses.
Two dukes contemplate the statue of the Madonna, slender, mobile, and twisted like a flame.
On the lids, a memorable cycle of grieving statues represents the phases of the day.
The sorrowful dawn stretches her limbs with a grimace of painful foreboding.
The dull evening seems crushed and coarsened by the exertions of the day.
On the other tomb, the terrible day presents a fearful, ghost-like face above rounded muscles,
while the wonderful night wears the faint smile of drowsiness, of loss of consciousness.
In 1524, while work proceeds on the Medici chapel, Michelangelo begins building the Laurentian
Library, also in the San Lorenzo complex.
A prodigious, ingenious vestibule with the columns built into the walls and a stairway
that fans out in a cascade gives access to the long, brightly lit reading room, for which
Michelangelo also designed the floor, the benches, and the ceiling in an explicit act of love
for books, reading, and humanistic culture.
After the Battle of Pavia in 1525, the Spanish gained the upper hand over much of Italy.
Two years later, Rome was sacked by the German and Spanish troops of Charles V.
The eternal city, raped and brutalized by a mob of soldiers of fortune, is the image
of the dream of the Renaissance crushed beneath the weight of events.
Michelangelo takes on public assignments, flees from Florence, then returns to devote
himself to creating a system of heavy fortifications in the San Miniato area.
A few traces still remain, as well as some spectacular technical drawings.
Michelangelo's existential drama is expressed unforgettably by the unfinished captives,
which were executed for the tomb of Julius II, but remained in Florence in the Academia.
Each figure seems to fight with the marble in an agonizing contrast between man and nature,
between spirit and earthly prison, that perhaps reflects not only Michelangelo's political
anxieties, but also his more secret and painful feelings.
During the 1530s, Michelangelo reaches the age of 60.
These years are marked by bitter reflections on the themes of love, vanishing beauty, and
the impossibility in these late years of achieving and maintaining deep, affectionate relationships.
In his drawings and poetry, he does not hesitate to admit to a troubled sensual life, in which
his attraction for beauty itself, such as in the young seductive Tomaso Cavaliere, must
give way to awareness of the inexorable passage of time and religious constrictions.
As he writes in an improvised sonnet, he discovers he has become old in a day.
The tension between thought and action is also expressed by his bust of Brutus, where
the drawn strong-willed features charged with energy leap from the draped bust clumsily
recharged by Tiberio Calcani.
In 1534, Michelangelo leaves Florence forever, settling in Rome, where he will spend the
last 30 years of his life.
Pope Clement VII has a new assignment for him, the universal judgment on the altar wall
of the Sistine Chapel.
It is very heavy work, which he will not finish until 1541.
Michelangelo destroys previous frescoes by Perugino, and even two lunettes he himself
has done.
The composition hinges on the athletic, implacable Christ, surrounded by a great whirl of nude
bodies engulfed in the wave of the Day of Wrath.
One of the saints, Bartholomew, is holding his own skin.
In the impressive mask of the flayed saint, Michelangelo has painted himself.
He too, emptied, crushed by the work and its titanic power.
Mingled on a compact, uniform sky are heaven and hell, the resurrection of the flesh and
the last judgment, angels and devils, the blessed and the damned, all together in one
terrible vision, peopled by some 400 figures.
Together with this fall of man, one senses the thunderous crash of an age of golden illusions,
the Renaissance.
While he is working on the fresco, Michelangelo keeps up a dense and lofty correspondence
with Vittoria Colonna, a poet and intellectual close to the Catholic reform movement.
He dedicates drawings, letters and sonnets to her.
It is an affectionate but melancholy page of his life.
Thanks to his relationship with Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo renders even more dense and personal
the themes of salvation, condemnation and predestination, expressed in the most terrifying
figures of the lower part of the last judgment.
1
After finishing the last judgment, Michelangelo is engaged in various projects for Pope Paul III.
Between 1545 and 1546, he completes the façade of the Farnese Palace.
Now the French Embassy, it is one of the most spectacular 16th century buildings in Rome.
In addition, he paints two emotion-laden scenes for the Pauline Chapel in the Vatican.
The upside-down crucifixion of St. Peter, in which the Apostle writhes in torment and sends us a look that pierces the soul.
And the conversion of Saul, blinded and terror-struck by the beam of light in which Christ manifests himself.
Now over 70 years old and deeply saddened by the death of Vittoria Colonna in 1547, Michelangelo is defining a new language.
These are years of very intense activity as an architect.
In the Piazza del Campidoglio, which is the most integral and intense complex, the formidable design of the paving and the precise lines of the palaces give life to an ensemble conceived as a dynamic weaving of force relationships, with daring use of perspective and visual distortion.
The dialogue is between antiquity, represented by the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, and the modern light structures of the surrounding buildings.
Meanwhile, Michelangelo is put in charge of replacing the early Christian Basilica of St. Peter's, a colossal task still in its early stages.
Michelangelo begins construction on the dome, the universal symbol of unity and power, but will not live to see it completed.
Around 1553, with the Pietà for the Cathedral of Florence, Michelangelo makes his return after many years to sculpture.
The theme is now tackled with the bitter awareness of the man who has reached old age.
Above the group is Nicodemus, or Michelangelo himself, who depicts himself as a witness of pain and death, although strong, dignified, and intensely human.
With the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church is undergoing deep renewal in devotion, liturgy, and sacred art.
Michelangelo, who completes the tomb of Julius II in diminished form, feels like a survivor from time's long past.
How distant those days of humanism in the gardens of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
One of the best known consequences of the provisions on sacred art is the demand that some of the nudes of the Last Judgment be covered with draperies, sarcastically referred to as breeches.
The work is carried out less than a month before Michelangelo's death.
In his Roman home on the Maselle dei Corvi, now disappeared, Michelangelo continues to work.
As architect, he designs the Church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini and gives the Sforza Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore an original futuristic plan.
But his final toils are for a sculpture, the Rondanini Pietà.
At 89, Michelangelo pushes himself towards new frontiers of the image.
He abandons the consolidated approach of the sitting Madonna and leaves us this completely vertical group, with Christ's body slipping down and the mother vainly trying to hold it up.
The last unfinished work of a genius, the Rondanini Pietà, breaks out of the mainstream of the history of art.
Michelangelo gives the last chisel blows to the legs of Christ three days before his death, on February the 18th, 1564.
Three weeks later, Leonardo Buonarroti, Michelangelo's nephew, smuggles his body to Florence.
Solemn funeral rites, public celebrations, a great burial monument built by Giorgio Vasari in the Basilica of Santa Croce.
Florence embraces Michelangelo, honors the last great master of an unrepeatable epoch, which ends along with him.
But Michelangelo, the witness and protagonist of long decades of art, history, passion and torment, disliked public fanfare.
A spiritual heir of Dante, his poetic but especially his human model, Michelangelo would have preferred the silence of the white marble of the mountains of Luni as his window on the infinite.
So his view of the stars and the sea would not be obstructed.
He would have preferred the silence of the white marble of the mountains of Luni as his window on the infinite.
He would have preferred the silence of the white marble of the mountains of Luni as his window on the infinite.
He would have preferred the silence of the white marble of the mountains of Luni as his window on the infinite.
He would have preferred the silence of the white marble of the mountains of Luni as his window on the infinite.
He would have preferred the silence of the white marble of the mountains of Luni as his window on the infinite.
He would have preferred the silence of the white marble of the mountains of Luni as his window on the infinite.
He would have preferred the silence of the white marble of Luni as his window on the infinite.