essay for michelangelo

Michelangelo Biography

Born on March 6, 1475, in a town near Arezzo, in Tuscany, Michelangelo lived a comfortable life during his childhood. His family were bankers in Florence, but his father decided to enter a government post when the bank industry failed. When he was born, his father served as the judicial administrator at Caprese, as well as Chiusi's local administrator. Eventually, Michelangelo's family went back to Florence, and this was where the artist lived much of his childhood. In 1481, his mother died of a chronic illness, and he was only 6 years of age at that time. The artist came to Florence, so he could study grammar under his master Francesco da Urbino. However, he was vaguely interested in formal schooling, as he was more fascinated with copying paintings from various churches in Italy. He was also able to meet several painters who inspired him to pursue his art education.

Life in Florence

At that time, Florence was considered as the center of learning and arts throughout Italy. The town council sponsored art, along with wealthy patrons, banking associates and merchant guilds. Moreover, the Renaissance was flourishing in this Italian city, which gave rise to impressive structures and artistic masterpieces. At 13 years old, Michelangelo obtained apprenticeship from Ghirlandaio. A year after, the artist's father asked Ghirlandaio to pay Michelangelo as an artist, and this was a rather unusual circumstance during that time. In 1489, a wealthy man and Florence's de facto ruler named Lorenzo de Medici asked Ghirlandaio for two of his best pupils. Without hesitation, he recommended Francesco Granacci and Michelangelo. Hence, the young artist was given a chance to be enrolled in the Humanist Academy, an institution founded by the Medici. While studying at the academy, Michelangelo realized that his outlook and works were rather influenced by numerous writers and philosophers in history such as Pico della Mirandola, Poliziano and Marsilio Ficino. It was also during this period that the artist began sculpting some of his renowned works including the Battle of the Centaurs and Madonna of the Steps . Poliziano suggested the theme Battle of the Centaurs, and this artwork was commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici.

Accomplishments

When Lorenzo died in 1492, this caused some challenges and uncertainties in the life of Michelangelo. He was forced to leave the security of living and earning money at the Medici court, and he came back to his father's house. A few months after, he was able to make a wooden crucifix, which he gave as a present to the prior of the Santa Maria del Santo Spirito. The said prior gave the artist a chance to study the anatomy of some of the corpses found at the church's hospital. By 1493, he decided to buy a marble that he could use for a life-size statue of Hercules, which was eventually sent to France. The artist was given another chance to re-enter the Medici court in 1494, and this was the time when Piero de Medici commissioned from him a snow statue. During the same year that the artist came back to the court, the Medici had to leave Florence because of the rise of Savonarola. Michelangelo, however, left the city even before the political crisis started. He relocated to Venice before proceeding to Bologna, where he was tasked to complete the carving of some small figures found at the Shrine and tomb of St. Dominic. Before 1494 ended, he traveled back to Florence during the time Charles VIII were experiencing defeats and Florence was in a stable condition. While in Florence, the artist became preoccupied with his latest projects such as the statue of a sleeping Cupid and the child St. John the Baptist.

Life in Rome

At 21 years of age, the artist came to Rome where he engaged in new projects. On July 4, 1496, he began sculpting the massive statue of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. Cardinal Raffaele Riario commissioned him to do this project, but he eventually rejected the artist's work. Afterward, the statue was bought by Jacopo Galli, a wealthy banker. In 1497, the French Ambassador in Rome commissioned Michelangelo's work called the Pieta. Although the artist was very much devoted to his sculpting, he became deeply interested in drawing and painting. In fact, while in Rome, he completed several artworks that made him one of the most popular artists in his time.

Later in Michelangelo's life, he was able to create several Pietas, which reflects different images. The Pieta of Vittoria Colonna, for instance, was a chalk drawing that presented Mary with upraised arms and hands, which indicated her prophetic role. As for the frontal features of the image, it resembled the fresco by Masaccio, which is found at the Holy Trinity in Santa Maria Novella, in Florence. As for the Florentine Pieta, the artist depicted himself as the old image of Nicodemus as he lowered Jesus' body upon his death on the cross. Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Jesus, were also included in this Pieta . It can be found that the leg and left arm of Jesus in this Pieta was smashed, which was said to have been done by Michelangelo. Eventually, the disfigured arm and leg were repaired by Tiberio Calcagni, the artist's pupil. According to scholars, the Rondanini Pieta was Michelangelo's final work, yet it remains unfinished because he started working on it until there was a lack of stone to complete the work. Hence, this work of art maintained an abstract quality that resembled the 20th century concept and style of sculpting. Along with Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael , and Donatello , Michelangelo was responsible for sixteenth century Florence becoming the century of a movement of artists that has permanently enriched western culture. Considered as one of the leading lights of the Italian Renaissance , Michelangelo was without a doubt one of the most inspirational and talented artists in modern history.

Sistine Chapel Ceiling

The Last Judgment

The Creation of Adam

The Deposition

Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Plants

Madonna of Bruges

The Battle of Cascina

The Torment of Saint Anthony

Risen Christ

Michelangelo’s Sculpture

Selected essays.

Leo Steinberg

320 pages | 121 color plates, 127 halftones | 8 1/2 x 11 | © 2018

Essays by Leo Steinberg

Art: American Art , Art Criticism , European Art

History: European History

Religion: Christianity

• Table of contents
• Author Events

Related Titles

"Steinberg returns the act of looking to center stage, insisting on it as the primary, indispensable instrument for understanding works of art. In an intellectual climate that holds that reading—critical theory—is the only true path to wisdom, the return of Leo Steinberg’s singular eye and mind could not be more timely or necessary."

Eric Gibson | New Criterion

"This book is the first in a series of five volumes in the 'Essays by Leo Steinberg' series, which will offer selected treasures, some obscure, revealing the unique erudition and insight of the late Steinberg (1920–2011). Steinberg was one of the most important art historians of his generation, but not everything he wrote made it into print before his death. The present volume makes available not only Steinberg's published essays and their subsequent revisions but also unpublished lectures, a review, and other revealing addenda to his life and legacy. The essays focus on Michelangelo’s sculpture . . . but also included and important are Steinberg's writings about his method of looking at and writing about art. Schwartz's preface, an introduction by art historian Richard Neer (Univ. of Chicago), and a lengthy chronology help make the man just as fascinating as his writings, here listed in a comprehensive bibliography. Schwartz has produced a respectful and erudite trove for all students and scholars interested in art. These writings, and those in forthcoming volumes in the series . . . will have inestimable value for anyone willing to take the rewarding plunge into Steinberg’s mind. . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended."

"Posthumously collected in  Michelangelo’s Sculpture: Selected Essays  are five previously published articles and two unpublished lectures, attentively edited and freshly illustrated."

The Art Newspaper

"In this well-illustrated collection Steinberg focuses on Michelangelo's sculpted Pietàs , presciently treating issues of historical and contemporary reception, of the status and evidentiary value of copies, and of the 'mixed temporality' of Renaissance art. . . . While by now it is a trope of Steinberg reviews to comment on the lucidity, elegance and engaging quality of his writing style, the praise bears repeating here. What I found most impressive in this moment of increased scholarly isolation was the sense of voice and presence that Steinberg brings to his writing. One often feels as if in direct conversation with the author, and moments of genuine hilarity bubble up throughout the text. . . . I can find virtually no fault with this compelling collection: even up to fifty years later, Leo Steinberg's words still give food for thought, granting us the rare opportunity to 'look anew' at some cherished old masterpieces."

“Sheila Schwartz, an art historian who worked closely with Steinberg, has edited these essays with a discernment that’s matched by the elegance of the volumes, which are among the most beautifully produced art books of recent years.”

New York Review of Books

"This collection of Steinberg’s essays is beautiful, scholarly, and a credit to Schultz, Neer, and Steinberg himself."

Renaissance and Reformation

Table of Contents

Edward A. Vazquez

Doris Salcedo

Julie Rodrigues Widholm

Antony Gormley on Sculpture

Antony Gormley

Isa Genzken

Be the first to know.

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press

93 Michelangelo Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best michelangelo topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 good research topics about michelangelo, 📌 most interesting michelangelo topics to write about, ❓ questions about michelangelo.

• Michelangelo’, Donatello’ and Verrocchio’ Sculptures of David The cast of bronze and striking a very unusual pose, not to mention the fact that the clothes “worn” by David were considered very inappropriate at the time, the sculpture represented a challenge to the […]
• Da Vinci’s and Michelangelo’s Paintings Comparison Two of the greatest artists of all time, Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo are very much noted as the masters of the two greatest qualities of craft and communication. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Michelangelo’s “Bacchus” Sculpture Analysis Furthermore, the specified size of the sculpture allows for experiencing the magnitude and power of the challenging ideas that Michelangelo introduced in the specified art piece.
• Pablo Picasso and Michelangelo Buonarroti He was born in the year 1881 and died in the year 1973 having been majorly involved in the fields of painting and sculpture.
• Michelangelo’s Artwork Michelangelo was taught sculpture by Bertoldo di Giovanni. Michelangelo was a renaissance artist and his works were greatly influenced by humanism.
• Michelangelo’s Madonna of the Stairs The sculpture is important from a historical perspective because it helps the beholder to grasp the enormity of Michelangelo’s genius as well as his unique approach to the canons of Christian iconography.
• The Painting “The Creation of Adam” by Michelangelo It is considered that the body type of Adam and God was heavily inspired by the statue of the Vatican’s Belvedere Torso.
• Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam The Creation of Adam is one of the famous frescos by Michelangelo Buonarotti, the Italian artist of the epoch of Renaissance.
• The Artwork “Pieta” by Michelangelo The subject matter of Michelangelo’s Pieta portrait is the body of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. This artwork is a picture of one of the seven sorrows of the Virgin Mary, as experienced […]
• The Sistine Chapel Painting by Buonarroti Michelangelo One of the most peculiar things about the narrative framework of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling is the order of the frescoes, with the final one referring the viewer to the beginning of time and the […]
• “The Creation of Adam” by Michelangelo Buonarroti “The Creation of Adam” is part of the painting of the vault of the Sistine Chapel which can be considered one of the major symbols of all Western European art.
• The Renaissance: Donatello’s vs. Michelangelo’s Statue of David The Renaissance was a sign of the beginning of a new age in art, science, knowledge, religion, and culture that resurrected the classical models of the periods of Ancient Greece and Rome while using modern […]
• The Sculpture “David” by Michelangelo In many respects, Michelangelo’s David may serve as a metaphor for humanism in the Renaissance. Michelangelo’s magnificent work may represent the force and beauty of humanism, but it is a distinctively Christian humanism within the […]
• Michelangelo’s “Sistine Chapel Ceiling” Artwork As a result, the painting is stylistically significant as it sheds light on the attributes and special features of high Renaissance artwork. The whole painting is rich textured and detailed, which is a well-known attribute […]
• Michelangelo’s Sculpture and Webber’s Music Analysis This paper is devoted to the analysis of the David of Michelangelo, one of the most influential and famous sculptures, and “The Music of the Night” composition by Andrew Lloyd Webber from his musical The […]
• The High Renaissance: The Pietà by Michelangelo The art of the High Renaissance dates from the late 15th century and the first three decades of the 16th century.
• Michelangelo: “Five Studies For the Figure of Haman” His drawing Five Studies for the Figure of Haman represents one of the scenes of the Cappella Sistina, the crucifixion of the Jews’ enemy Haman.
• Style and Composition: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Some artists prefer to use definite colors to identify the mood and the primary meaning of a certain allegory or a set of images in the picture, while others try to compose the same images […]
• Michelangelo’s Pietà and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother: Comparison and Contrast The mass of the marble sculpture appears to be shifted to the left, where Christ’s body is located; but the seemingly broken symmetry of the sculpture is restored by the semantic accent placed to the […]
• Michelangelo Merisi Da Caravaggio’s Art Influence The artists copied much of Caravaggio’s works, hid themes, his way of painting, the use of color, shade and others. So, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was a great artist who was the example, the model […]
• Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci: Two Geniuses The two implications of these is that mannerisms was used to refer to the actual style of the artist, or to acknowledge that the artist had a unique approach that was beautiful in its own […]
• Paintings by Michelangelo and Vermeer Comparison The material Michelangelo uses contributes to the strength and realistic appearance of the sculpture as well and contributes to the meaning of the sculpture.
• Four Religious Paintings of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio As was the custom, burials were done in deep and dark catacombs and the grave diggers seem to appear from the murky shadows and the strong lines of force in their act of digging seem […]
• Art History. Michelangelo’s David Restoration Hundreds of attempts are having been made by restorers and art historians to come to an agreement on the extent to which the works of art should be restored and the way how it should […]
• Michelangelo and Da Vinci’s Art Appreciation It symbolizes the incident of the last supper during the last days of Jesus when he declared that one of his disciples would inform him. The artist did the masterpiece in an attempt to produce […]
• The Art of Sculpting: Michelangelo’s David The Renaissance was an era in the history of Europe that was exemplified by blossoming culture, starting in Florence towards the end of the 15th century and, from then on, spread to whatever remains of […]
• Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Art It is also important to notice the kind of confidence in the face of David in this sculpture. In this painting, it is apparent that the angels gave a helping hand in the creation of […]
• Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti The same light is used to tell us more about the environment The extreme end of the image which represent the distance between the lady and the landscape is lighter.
• Michelangelo’s Life and Work Due to his immense skills and wide collection of artistic works, early museums documented his works and as it turns out, he was the most famous artist of the 16th century.
• An Analysis of Michelangelo’s Work In the essay, a detailed analysis of the Pieta shall be given particularly criticizing an error that Michelangelo had made in the design of the sculpture.
• Comparing and Contrasting sculptures of Michelangelo and Rodin
• Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Life And Attitude
• Renaissance Humanism and Michelangelo’s Sculpture of David
• Renaissance Culture: Donatello, Michelangelo and Shakespeare
• Michelangelo: Renowned Artist and Expert Anatomist
• Michelangelo’s Tomb Projects and Inspiration
• Michelangelo Buonarroti His Life and Work
• Michelangelo’s Personality and Things He Brought to People
• The True Meaning and Characteristics of Michelangelo’s Work
• Michelangelo’s The Rome Pieta and Crouching Boy, and Nola’s Monument of Don Pedro of Toledo
• The Painting, Sections, Theme, and Restoration of Michelangelo’s Frescoes on the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
• Michelangelo as Archetypal Renaissance Artist
• Mannerism: Michelangelo and High Renaissance
• Michelangelo: The Greatest Artist of the Renaissance Era
• Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Defining the Traits of the High Renaissance Period
• Man, Love, and Women Speaking of Michelangelo
• Michelangelo and the Italian Renaissance
• Michelangelo and Jacopo Sansovino’s Relationship
• Michelangelo and His Works in Various Fields of Art
• The Michelangelo Effect: Art Improves the Performance in a Virtual Reality Task Developed for Upper Limb Neurorehabilitation
• Comparing the Similarities and Differences Between the Sculptures of Michelangelo and Brian Bress
• The Life and Works of Art of the Famous Renaissance Artist, Michelangelo Buonarroti
• Michelangelo and the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
• The Hidden Meanings Within Michelangelo ‘s Creation
• The Life, Times and Influence of Popular Artist, Michelangelo
• Imaginative Michelangelo: Agony and Ecstasy
• The Last Judgment and the Life of the Painter, Michelangelo Buonarroti
• Comparing and Contrasting the Death of Marat and Michelangelo’s
• Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Greatest of the Italian Renaissance Artists
• Comparing the Similarities and Differences Between the Statue of David by Michelangelo and Bernini
• The Working Relationship Between Pope Julius II and Michelangelo
• Ethical Considerations Concerning Michelangelo Works
• Painting The Sistine Chapel By Michelangelo
• Michelangelo Sistine Chapel How Is It Humanism
• The Ethical and Philosophical Situations Throughout the Life of the Italian Artist, Michelangelo Buonarroti
• Comparing and Contrasting the Renaissance Artworks Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci and Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo
• Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling
• Michelangelo’s Fresco the Last Judgment
• What Are the Features of the “Madonna of the Stairs” – Michelangelo’s Earliest Marble Work?
• What Are the Similarities and Differences Between Three Different Statues of David – By Donatello, Michelangelo, and Bernini?
• Why Did Michelangelo Use Different Groups of Figures in the Two Frescoes of the Pauline Chapel, the Crucifixion of Saint Peter, and the Conversion of Saul?
• How Did Michelangelo’s Youth Stay in Florence, the Largest Center of Art and Education in Italy, Affect His Work?
• What Creative Abilities and Mastery of Michelangelo in Various Artistic Fields Define Him as an Archetypal Man of the Renaissance?
• What Unites Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Raphael as the Three Giants of the Florentine High Renaissance?
• Why Did Michelangelo’s Work Have a Lasting Impact on Western Art?
• What Is the True Meaning and Characteristics of Michelangelo’s Work?
• How Did Michelangelo’s Catholic Faith Influence His Work?
• What Are the Similarities and Differences Between Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s David?
• Why Was Michelangelo Often Called Il Divino (‘The Divine One’)?
• What Was the Working Relationship Between Pope Julius II and Michelangelo?
• Is Michelangelo’s Talent Still on Display After Restoration in the Sistine Chapel?
• What Influence Did Michelangelo’s Works Have On Artists, Sculptors, and Architects of Many Generations?
• Was Michelangelo the Greatest Artist of the Renaissance Era?
• What Are the Similarities and Differences Between the Sculptures of Michelangelo and Rodin?
• What Sculptural Methods Did Michelangelo Use and How Did He Reveal What He Perceived Within the Rock?
• How Did Marsilio Ficino, Pico Della Mirandola and Poliziano Influence Michelangelo’s Work and Outlook?
• Why Did the Statue of David Finally Attest to Michelangelo’s Preeminence as a Sculptor of Extraordinary Technical Skill and Power of Symbolic Imagination?
• What Was Michelangelo’s View of the Afterlife?
• What Does Renaissance Humanism Mean and How Is It Reflected in the Sculpture of Michelangelo’s David?
• How Did the Michelangelo’s Sculpture “David” Become a Symbol of the City?
• Why Was Michelangelo’s Work Inspired by Models From Classical Antiquity?
• What Are the Similarities and Differences Between Leonardo Da Vinci’s Renaissance Painting Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel?
• What Steps Did Michelangelo Take To Complete the Statue of David?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, March 2). 93 Michelangelo Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/michelangelo-essay-topics/

"93 Michelangelo Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." IvyPanda , 2 Mar. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/michelangelo-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '93 Michelangelo Essay Topic Ideas & Examples'. 2 March.

IvyPanda . 2024. "93 Michelangelo Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/michelangelo-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "93 Michelangelo Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/michelangelo-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "93 Michelangelo Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/michelangelo-essay-topics/.

• Leonardo da Vinci Questions
• Mona Lisa Research Ideas
• Pablo Picasso Paper Topics
• Vincent van Gogh Research Ideas
• Renaissance Essay Titles
• Baroque Essay Topics
• Romanticism Titles
• Italian Renaissance Essay Ideas
• Artists Research Ideas
• Ceramics Titles
• Expressionism Research Topics
• Impressionism Research Ideas
• 3D Printing Titles
• Photography Essay Topics
• Contemporary Art Questions

Advertisement

More from the Review

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest

• The New York Review of Books: recent articles and content from nybooks.com
• The Reader's Catalog and NYR Shop: gifts for readers and NYR merchandise offers
• New York Review Books: news and offers about the books we publish
• I consent to having NYR add my email to their mailing list.
• Hidden Form Source

May 9, 2024

Current Issue

A Lesson from Michelangelo

March 23, 1995 issue

Submit a letter:

Email us [email protected]

In old age, Giambologna used to tell his friends the story of how, as a young man, a Flemish sculptor newly arrived in Rome, he made a model to his own original design, finished it coll’alito , “with his breath”—that is to say, with the utmost care, bringing it to the very peak of finish—and went to show it to the great Michelangelo. And Michelangelo took the model in his hands and completely destroyed it, and then remodeled it according to his way of thinking, and did so with marvelous skill, so that the outcome was quite the opposite of what the young man had done. And then Michelangelo said to Giambologna: Now go and learn the art of modeling before you learn the art of finishing. 1

One supposes from this terrible story that the model must have been made of wax. One supposes that, even on a hot summer’s afternoon in Rome, it would have needed a certain amount of working before the wax became malleable enough for Michelangelo to shape according to his own wishes. Who knows, perhaps several minutes were involved. They must have seemed like hours, as the young sculptor watched, and the wrathful old genius, biting his lower lip, squeezed and squashed and pounded away at the model that had been so lovingly finished. And well before the new model began to emerge, and with it the ostensive reason for the exercise—learn to model before you learn to finish—another point was being made: See how I crush all your ambitions and aspirations, see how feeble your work is in comparison with mine, see how presumptuous you were even to dare to cross the threshold— Thus I destroy you!

There were compensations, of course, for the young Giambologna. He had walked in with an example of his juvenilia, and he left carrying a vibrant little Michelangelo. You might say that he was lucky the master had thought him worthy of the lesson, even if the lesson had to be delivered in such a devastating way. You might say this. Or you might argue that the ostensive lesson was only a pretext for the destruction of the young man’s work.

There is no such thing as the artistic personality—not in poetry, not in the visual arts. Michelangelo’s personality was just one of the colorful range on offer. He was paranoid about his productions, keeping his drawings secret not only from his contemporaries who might include potential plagiarists, but also from posterity itself. As his days drew to a close he made two large bonfires, and not a drawing or cartoon was found in his studio after his death. 2 And this paranoia extended to his relations with other artists. He did not “bring on young talent.” He appears to have surrounded himself deliberately with no-hopers, and it is easy to imagine that it was the skill, not the shortcomings, of Giambologna that drove him into such a rage.

But you don’t have to be like that in order to be a great artist, or a great poet. If Michelangelo was both, so, apparently, was Leonardo, of whom Vasari tells us that, in addition to his gifts as a musician, he was the most talented improviser in verse of his time. 3 We are told by one scholar that while “Michelangelo jealously guarded his artistic property against other artists, it was not in keeping with Leonardo’s nature to trouble himself to preserve the authorship of the wealth of ideas which poured out of him,” that he was

amiable by nature, communicative and ready to be of help… when he turned to the greater themes of painting or sculpture, he was interested above everything else in the solution of some fundamental problem; when he had succeeded to his own satisfaction, perhaps only theoretically, he liked to leave its execution to others; and what happened further to the work of art seems to have troubled him but little, much less did it occur to him to sign it. He was so independent and had so little vanity that in the execution of his work the identity of the patron had not the slightest influence with him. 4

And yet there were, as Vasari makes clear, limits to Leonardo’s lack of vanity: he did not tolerate insulting behavior, he could not stand a foolish, ignorant patron, and he couldn’t bear to remain in the same city as Michelangelo. Nor Michelangelo with him. So one went off to Rome, and the other to the court of the King of France, and thereby they put between themselves about as great a distance as they possibly could, without falling off the edge of what they deemed the civilized world.

But it does not follow from this that genius always repels genius. Verrocchio presents a further type, a teacher who was happy to surround himself with talent, who trained Lorenzo di Credi and loved him above all others. Verrocchio it was who took on the young Leonardo and who famously decided to renounce painting when he recognized that Leonardo’s angel in the Baptism outshone his own work. He was ashamed to have been outpainted by a mere boy. But if this renunciation seems hysterical, I would say that it is less so in Verrocchio’s case than it would have been in others’. Verrocchio had plenty of other fish to fry. He had begun life as a goldsmith. In Rome, he

saw the high value that was put on the many statues and other antiques being discovered there, and the way the Pope had the bronze horse set up in St. John Lateran, as well as the attention given even to the bits and pieces, let alone the complete works of sculpture, that were being discovered every day.

So he decided to give up being a goldsmith and be a sculptor instead. And when he had won honor as a sculptor so that “there was nothing left for him to achieve,” he turned his hand to painting.

I take these stories about artists, from Baldinucci and Vasari, because they date from a period when it appears that one could acknowledge straightforwardly motives of which we would today be obscurely ashamed. Verrocchio observes that there is much honor to be gained in the field of sculpture, so he becomes a sculptor, and when he feels he has won the honor that is going, he turns to painting with the same motive, but when he sees his way blocked by Leonardo he turns back to sculpture again. There is something equable about this temperament and something generous about the recognition of which it was capable. But this generosity was far from typical of its time and place. It was noteworthy. It was a cause célèbre .

Otherwise one feels that the Italy these artists worked in was a place of the most vicious rivalry and backbiting, maneuverings for commissions, anglings for patronage, plots, triumphs, and disappointments. You had to wait literally for years to be paid. If your work was deemed ugly, you soon learnt about it from lampoons or pasquinades. You got stabbed in the back. Anonymous denunciations for sodomy would arrive, as regular as parking tickets.

Since your work, standing, and honor were all bound together, the award of a grand commission to a friend or rival would be a devastating blow. It would make you rethink your life, as—and this is the last of the Vasarian exempla—Brunelleschi and Donatello were forced to do when Ghiberti won the famous competition for the Florence Baptistry doors. The contest had taken a year. When the entries were exhibited, it was clear to the two friends that Ghiberti’s work was better than theirs, and so they went to the consuls and argued that Ghiberti should get the commission. And for this, Vasari says, “they deserved more praise than if they had done the work perfectly themselves. What happy men they were! They helped each other, and found pleasure in praising the work of others. What a deplorable contrast is presented by our modern artists who are not content with injuring one another, but who viciously and enviously rend others as well!”

So Vasari praises the two artists, and he is not sentimental either, for he goes on to relate how the consuls asked Brunelleschi, who had clearly come a very good second, whether he would cooperate with Ghiberti on the doors, but Brunelleschi said no, since “he was determined to be supreme in some other art rather than merely be a partner or take second place…” Nor was this a passing fit of pique, although both artists eventually did return to Florence and did help Ghiberti. Perhaps the strength of their sense of failure may be gauged from the fact that Donatello, who had not done so well, took a year away from Florence, whereas Brunelleschi, the honorable runner-up, took at least five, and when he did return, he did so principally as an architect.

It’s not enough to fail. You have to come to feel your failure, to live it through, to turn it over in your hand, like a stone with strange markings. You have to wake up in the middle of the night and hear it whistling around the roof, or chomping in the field below, like some loyal horse—My failure, my very own failure, I thought I’d left it behind in Florence, but look, it’s followed me here to Rome. And the horse looks up at you in the moonlight and you feel its melancholy reproach. This is after all the failure for which you were responsible. Why are you neglecting your failure?

Many people live in such a horror of failure that they can never embark on any great enterprise. And this inability to get going in the first place is the worst kind of failure because there truly is no way out. You can cover up. You can hide behind a mask of exquisite sensibility. You can congratulate yourself on the fact that your standards are so high that no human effort could possibly match up to them. You can make yourself unpleasant to your contemporaries by becoming expert on their shortcomings. In the end, nothing is achieved by this timidity.

Or you can permit yourself one failure in life, and devote your remaining days to mourning. “Alas, alas, the critics panned my play.” “When did this happen, friend?” “In 1894!” This failure, it would seem, has been kept like a trophy, lovingly polished and always on display. But for a productive life, and a happy one, each failure must be felt and worked through. It must form part of the dynamic of your creativity.

The judgment on Donatello’s competition entry was: good design, poor execution. Donatello could decipher from that a message saying: You are not yet fully formed as an artist; you must study. But the message received by Brunelleschi was: You will never be as good as Ghiberti. This was a hard blow. Brunelleschi did what he felt necessary—sold a small farm and, with Donatello, walked down to Rome. And there something happened to them which I hope will happen to any poet reading this. Failure rewarded them a thousandfold.

For they came to a place, a sort of Land of Green Ginger, where every answer to every urgent inquiry lay literally at their feet. This, for a poet, would be like discovering voice, technique, and infinite subject matter, fresh and unused, and finding them all in a flash. The ruins of Rome were fresh and unused. You pulled back a caper bush and there lay an architrave. You peered behind the pigpen and there was a sarcophagus. You dug a little and there was a bust, a capital, a herm.

And so they dug and drew and made measurements of the astonishing buildings all around them, and they went without food, and they got filthy, and people decided they must be geomancers in search of treasure. Which wasn’t far wrong. For the secrets of the classical orders were revealing themselves, and the lost technology of the ancient world. But all this time Brunelleschi never revealed to Donatello—especially not to Donatello—the scope of his ambition to revive the classical art of architecture and make that his bid for fame. They were friends. They were rivals. For the project to be worthwhile, it had to be the means whereby Brunelleschi would defeat not only Ghiberti, but also Donatello, his best friend from the Salon des Refusés.

Why should artistic ambition be like that? Why should a sculptor, a poet, feel the need to be the unique object of admiration, to create around himself an illusion of being quite the only pebble, the only boulder on the beach? Why should uniqueness itself be so closely involved with our definition of a work of art, so that we expect every performance to be unique, every hand, every voice, every gesture?

Without looking too far for an answer, we might say that our efforts in the direction of art have something to do with a moment, or a period, in which we felt or knew ourselves to be unique. Feeding at the breast we were unique. (I mean, normally speaking. We are not piglets. We weren’t born in a litter.) Dandled on the lap we were unique, when our parents taught us all the new things we could do with our lips and our limbs. And this was a time of pure inventiveness. Everything we did was hailed as superb. We leapt up and down and our innards went wild with surprise. And the palms of our hands were beaten together. We learnt about rhythm and we learnt new ways of making a noise, and every noise we made was praised. And we learnt how to walk, and all eyes were upon us, the way they never would be again.

Because there follows the primal erasure, when we forget all those early experiences, and it is rather as if there is some mercy in this, since if we could remember the intensity of such pleasure it might spoil us for anything else. We forget what happened exactly, but we know that there was something, something to do with music and praise and everyone talking, something to do with flying through the air, something to do with dance.

And during this period of forgetting we have been forced to take a realistic view of the world, and to admit that there are other people in it besides ourselves and our adoring audience. And in our various ways of coping with this fact we form the basis of our personality. And one will say through his art: There can be only me—the rest being counterfeits. And another will say: There is me, and my best friend, and we are the best. And a third version would be: There is me and my best friend, who (but don’t tell him) isn’t as good as me.

Auden wrote a wonderful thing to Stephen Spender in 1942—it is quoted in Auden’s Juvenilia —when he said: “You (at least I fancy so) can be jealous of someone else writing a good poem because it seems a rival strength. I’m not, because every good poem, of yours say, is a strength, which is put at my disposal.” 5 And he said that this arose because Spender was strong and he, Auden, was weak, but his was a fertile weakness.

And it would indeed be a source of fertility to be blessed with that attitude both to the living and to the dead, so that everybody’s good poem is a source of strength to you, and the corpus of published poetry lies before you as the ruins of Rome appeared to Brunelleschi. One associates Auden’s luck in this regard with his abiding conviction that in any gathering he was always the youngest person in the room.

An extreme case of the opposite attitude would be that of Wordsworth in old age, at least the attitude that Carlyle claimed to detect:

I got him upon the subject of great poets, who I thought might be admirable equally to us both; but was rather mistaken, as I gradually found. Pope’s partial failure I was prepared for; less for the narrowish limits visible in Milton and others. I tried him with Burns, of whom he had sung tender recognition; but Burns also turned out to be a limited inferior creature, any genius he had a theme for one’s pathos rather; even Shakspeare himself had his blind sides, his limitations:—gradually it became apparent to me that of transcendent unlimited there was, to this Critic, probably but one specimen known, Wordsworth himself! He by no means said so, or hinted so, in words; but on the whole it was all I gathered from him in this considerable tête-à-tête of ours; and it was not an agreeable conquest. New notion as to Poetry or Poet I had not in the smallest degree got; but my insight into the depths of Wordsworth’s pride in himself had considerably augmented;—and it did not increase my love of him; though I did [not] in the least hate it either, so quiet was it, so fixed, un appealing, like a dim old lichened crag on the wayside, the private meaning of which, in contrast with any public meaning it had, you recognized with a kind of not wholly melancholy grin. 6

You notice how far we have come from the candid psychology of ambition as perceived by Vasari to the uncandid, sly, deceitful self-love as perceived by Carlyle, whose meaning, unpacked, was—there is only me, and there only ever has been me .

Nor was this simply something that Wordsworth came to believe at the end of his life. There was a period when his “intolerance of others,” as Gittings tells us, “was reported to have reached alarming lengths.” 7 And it happened that this was the period in which Keats, who admired Wordsworth to distraction, was ushered into his presence. He had sent a copy of his 1817 poems to Wordsworth, who, if he had read them, had done so without cutting all the pages. But all went well initially, and Wordsworth kindly asked what Keats had been writing recently. And from this point I shall follow Haydon’s account, even though the detail has been disputed. 8 What seems not in dispute is that Keats did a bit of a Giambologna. Haydon says:

I said he has just finished an exquisite ode to Pan—and as he had not a copy I begged Keats to repeat it—which he did in his usual half chant, (most touchingly) walking up & down the room—when he had done I felt really, as if I had heard a young Apollo—Wordsworth drily said “a Very pretty piece of Paganism”—This was unfeeling, & unworthy of his high Genius to a young worshipper like Keats—& Keats felt it deeply —so that if Keats has said any thing severe about our Friend; it was because he was wounded—and though he dined with Wordsworth after at my table—he never forgave him. 9

If it did not happen quite like this, something quite like this appears nevertheless to have happened, and Keats became aware of that quiet, fixed, unappealing, dim old lichened crag, and got a whiff of its meaning. Because his attitude does change, and it is not so long after this encounter that Keats writes his celebrated letter to Reynolds of February 3, 1818. Nothing from the surviving letters gives Keats’s side of the encounter, unless we take this passage as a record of a man recovering from an insult.

It may be said that we ought to read our Contemporaries, that Wordsworth &c should have their due from us, but for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist—Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself.

And a few lines later:

We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.—How beautiful are the retired flowers! how they would lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, “admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose!”

Well, we hate an insult both for the evidence it gives us of another’s malice, and for the way it finds us out, the way it gets at our self-esteem, or worse, if the insult thinks it can get at us, even though we feel passionately that we are not as base-minded as that. If Keats came from his encounter with Wordsworth insulted and disillusioned, it is not surprising that he should have refrained from saying so directly, for it is humiliating to admit that some trivial remark has cut us to the quick, humiliating further to give any evidence that the jibe has lodged with us, that it has arrived with all its luggage and intends to stay for a long time. Keats looked into Wordsworth’s soul and saw something unexpectedly petty:

Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in this. Each of the moderns like an Elector of Hanover governs his petty state, & knows how many straws are swept daily from the Causeways in all his dominions & has a continual itching that all the Housewives should have their coppers well scoured: the ancients were Emperors of vast Provinces, they had only heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit them—I will cut all this—I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt…

It may be that there was something about Keats that created alarm in his contemporaries. Byron seems hysterical in his attack on Keats’s “piss-a-bed” poetry: “No more Keats I entreat—flay him alive—if some of you don’t I must skin him myself[:] there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.——“ 10 And “Mr. Keats whose poetry you enquire after—appears to me what I have already said;—such writing is a sort of mental masturbation—he is always f—gg—g his Imagination .—I don’t mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.” 11 Then he becomes a “dirty little blackguard,” simply for having been praised in the Edinburgh Review . And then, in death, he is assumed to be a person of “such inordinate self-love he would probably not have been very happy.” Byron assumes it to be true, and becomes obsessed by the idea that Keats was killed off by a burst blood vessel after receiving a savage review in the Quarterly . He affects a kind of regret, but cannot conceal an illicit excitement at the story. It is hard not to conclude that Keats was seen as a threat by Byron, and that this was his greatest sin. As for Wordsworth, going through his impossible phase, Gittings says: “From 1815 to 1820, the difficult second half of a man’s forties, Wordsworth showed at his worst, and his emergence at fifty to something like his normal self was greeted by all with relief. It is an irony that his malaise coincided precisely with the whole of Keats’s writing life.” 12

Irony doesn’t seem quite strong enough a word to cover the implication of this passage: that one of the supremely gifted poets of his time should be driven into something that looked like a kind of mental illness, by the mere fact of another poet’s existence; that Wordsworth could not be at ease with himself until he knew that Keats was dead.

But if it were true, and if it were true that Byron suffered something like the same disease, then one would suppose that what identified Keats as a threat was his aspiration for greatness, rather than the greatness itself. It is not that either of the older poets had been put into a pother after reading the odes. It’s the Poems of 1817, stuff that might strike us, for the most part, as not exactly threatening—and anyway Words-worth hadn’t even read all of it, 13 and there’s no guarantee that Byron had either.

It seems unfair, excepting in this sense, that Keats’s encounter with opposition, with envy perhaps on Words-worth’s part, and his disenchantment, seems to have benefited him, to have made him stronger, whereas it was nothing unless debilitating to Words-worth. Keats had a strong and just sense of his own development, and he didn’t mind taking a nose dive:

The Genius of Poetry must work its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law & precept, but by sensation & watchfulness in itself—That which is creative must create itself—In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, & the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea & comfortable advice.—I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest. 14

So it might have been the aspiration that was the problem, as it is indeed a problem for anyone setting out in poetry. If I aspire to musicianship, I am at once set on a journey through a series of immensely complicated disciplines. It is extremely improbable that I will get anywhere without training. And it therefore does not happen that even a precocious musician seems pretentious. We feel, however much we envy the success, that it must have been earned. But it is far from clear how we are supposed to earn success in poetry. Poetry often seems unearned.

Nor is it all clear how we could be delayed, held back from achieving our aim, if we looked like a bit of a threat. Verrocchio can always hold Leonardo back, keeping him grinding colors, or preparing panels or busy at any number of prentice tasks. Or he could affect to bring him on, keeping him sketching from dawn till dusk, but always delaying the dread moment when he picks up the paintbrush. But in poetry there is really no equivalent for these in intermediate disciplines. The way to learn to write poetry is: to write poetry. So we pass directly from the aspiration to the activity itself, and that leaves us at first vulnerable, because, looked at in a certain way, we have no right to be writing poems at this stage. But unfortunately we have no option but to give it a whirl. The old joke—Do you play the violin? I don’t know, I’ve never tried—describes our predicament. We are in the position of someone who takes up a violin for the first time and has a go at giving a concert.

But you might object: surely there are things one can do, like writing parodies, like trying out the traditional forms, like studying other people’s poetry, like going in for competitions.

I would certainly say that people who have no interest at all in studying other people’s poetry are unlikely to produce it themselves, although it is not at all uncommon for them to attempt to do so. As for parodies and the trying out of forms, these are things that some people do and find useful. In the case of parody, its chief usefulness is in getting people to write poetry who are too shy or sly to admit that that is what they want to do.

As far as the trying out of traditional forms is concerned, I have this to say: that there seems to me to be a fundamental difference between trying out a traditional form as an exercise, and writing a poem in a traditional form. It is true that, in the context of a workshop, structure may be given to a group’s work by the trying out of certain famous forms, and it is true that such things can be fun as competitions or games among friends. But I do not think that the trying out of forms is an exercise that points in the direction of the writing of poems. Trying out the sonnet—taking a sonnet for a spin, putting the little filly through her paces—seems a rather different activity from the writing of poetry. The great questions of form go deeper than that, and the commitment implied is much more profound than the respectful nod in the direction of form-as-exercise would imply. Don’t try out a sonnet. Try to write a sonnet. Try to write a real sonnet. But that’s the whole aim. That’s not an exercise.

Auden tried everything there was going, but his attitude was different. It was much more like Brunelleschi and Donatello going crazy among the ruins of Rome, digging things up, finding how they worked, imitating them. And imitating for Auden meant much more than the banal copying of metrical pattern and rhyme scheme. It meant a recapturing and reinterpretation of the quality of a thing—a madrigal, a calypso, whatever it was.

There is another form of activity, though, besides reading other people’s work and trying perhaps to imitate it, and this is showing your work to other people. And this activity is of the essence. And of course it can be most devastating, usually because what one has written turns out to be a complete turkey, and we only realize this at the moment we hand the thing to our friends. We should all take heart though from the case of Flaubert, who put a phenomenal effort into the composition of the first version of his Temptation of Saint Anthony (one single episode involved him in the reading of sixty ancient texts, histories, and scholarly commentaries) and finally read it aloud to his friends Louis Bouilhet and Maxime DuCamp, who recalled later that

the hours that Bouilhet and I spent listening to Flaubert chant his lines—we sitting there silent, occasionally exchanging a glance—remain very painful in my memory. We kept straining our ears, always hoping that the action would begin, and always disappointed, for the situation remains the same from beginning to end. St. Anthony, bewildered, a little simple, really quite a blockhead if I dare say so, sees the various forms of temptation pass before him and responds with nothing but exclamations: “Ah! Ah! Oh! Mon dieu! Mon dieu!”… Flaubert grew heated as he read, and we tried to grow warm with him, but remained frozen… After the last reading [and the whole thing had taken thirty-two hours] Flaubert pounded the table: “Now; tell me frankly what you think.” Bouilhet was a shy man, but no one was firmer than he once he decided to express his opinion; and he said: “We think you should throw it into the fire and never speak of it again.” Flaubert leapt up and uttered a cry of horror…. He repeated certain lines to us, saying “But that is beautiful!” “Yes, it is beautiful…. There are excellent passages, some exquisite evocations of antiquity, but it is all lost in the bombast of the language. You wanted to make music and you have made only noise.” 15

I think we can assume that there was justice in what the two friends said, rather than envy, which is what Flaubert’s mother thought. But there remains the problem first of daring to show the work to your friends, next of bearing to listen to what they say about it, but finally, finally and most importantly, there is the whole matter of interpreting what your friends say, deciding whether to accept or reject their judgment, and figuring out where you are going to go from there. And this is where the delicate matter of the relations between poets comes in.

Why should it be, for instance, that Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan” in the late 1790s, say October or November 1797, that the Wordsworths definitely knew it in 1798 because Dorothy says in her Hamburgh journal that she “carried Kubla to a fountain,” meaning, we believe, that she carried her drinking can, which she called Kubla, but that Coleridge is not recorded as reciting the poem till 1811–1812, and that it was not published until 1816.

If we had written the poem would we be so reticent?

I believe the answer is that Coleridge wrote the poem, much as one writes any poem, with a great deal of excitement, and that he put it in his pocket and went over to see the Wordsworths. Now the state of mind one is in after writing a poem is rather like the state of mind that continues in a waking person after a particularly vivid dream—but with this difference, that we are under the illusion, after such a dream, that it will be of interest to others. But very few dreams are. They might interest our lovers, and they are meat and drink to our analysts, but not to anyone else. But we don’t know this, because the state of mind that produced the dream is still with us. Nor do we know, after we have written the poem, whether it will be of interest to others. Put it away for a while, and you can possibly tell, but at the moment of completion you merely hope that the thrill is not an illusion.

Coleridge came bounding over to see the Wordsworths, as he had often done, to read his latest work. And they sat in a rather damp parlor, and Coleridge launched into his reading, and while he was at it, full tilt, Dorothy was watching William, as she always did, for his reaction. And there was a little gesture which she knew well, which meant that his nose had been put out of joint. Keats noticed it too, and it survived in one of the passages I quoted. Wordsworth put his hand in his breeches pocket. And Dorothy knew that all was not well. Coleridge was in the process of committing an utter Giambologna.

The reading was over. Silence fell. And Coleridge, who was on a natural high not caused by anything remotely resembling substance abuse, thought—great, they’re impressed. And he waited for a compliment or two. And nothing happened, and finally he too began to suspect that something was up. And then Dorothy said, in a bright voice, “Well, at least I shall know what to call my drinking can now. Come along, Kubla, we’re going to the well.” And Wordsworth suddenly burst out laughing in a rather horrible, forced way, and said, “I say, Dorothy, that’s awfully good—Kubla Can—do you get it, Coleridge?” And Dorothy left the room, and silence fell again, punctuated occasionally by Words-worth’s chuckling over Dorothy’s joke.

Finally, it was Coleridge’s turn to say something, to cover up the dreadful Giambologna he appeared to have committed. And he began telling a story about how he had been taking opium and gone into a trance, and something about a person from Porlock, all of it made up. And Wordsworth turned to him and said: “I think you should throw that poem in the fire, Coleridge, and never speak of it again.”

Now if Coleridge had been Keats he would have fallen out of love with Wordsworth on the spot. But Coleridge was not Keats. He was absolutely convinced, and puzzled by the fact, that he had made a faux pas of the worst kind, because he could not recognize that thing that Keats and Carlyle recognized when they looked into Wordsworth’s soul—that unappealing, lichen-covered thing.

It was not that he was not sly, in his own way he was incredibly sly. He affected to like Southey’s poetry, of which he had a low opinion. Same with Byron. He thought he was the greatest of Wordsworth’s admirers, but he once went to great lengths to write a two-volume book, the Biographia Literaria , merely in order to be able to print a whole chapter on the defects of Wordsworth’s poetry, which he knew would be enough to send Wordsworth up the wall . A whole chapter on Wordsworth’s defects! And Byron read that chapter with particular interest. And Coleridge never knew what he, Coleridge, was up to.

If he’d been a character out of Vasari he could have understood that Wordsworth had to be the only one in his field, and he might even have done a better job of going off to Rome, or going to work at the court of the King of France, or whatever the equivalent would have been. But he couldn’t manage to fall out of love with him. He couldn’t leave him alone.

But “Kubla Khan” wouldn’t go away. Coleridge had improvised the story whereby he turned it into a curiosity, and it was as a curiosity that he would recite it to his friends. One day in early April 1816 he did so in the company of Byron—Byron who, despite his views on the Lake Poets, always had time for Coleridge (his letters show this), always admired poems such as “Christabel,” and had even put work in Coleridge’s way.

Byron was impressed, and immediately asked why Coleridge had not published such a fine work. Coleridge shrugged and said that Wordsworth hadn’t liked it. Thereupon my suggestion is that Byron set Coleridge right upon the character of his friend. When the poem saw print, it was with an acknowledgment of Byron’s encouragement.

The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, and, as far as the Author’s own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on grounds of any supposed poetic merits.

But Coleridge did not think Byron’s celebrity as a poet was deserved. As Henry Nelson Coleridge reported in his Table Talk (June 2, 1824),

Nothing of Lord Byron’s would live, nor much of the poetry of the day. The art was so neglected; the verses would not scan.

This then is the essence of a true Giambologna. It is based on a gross misunderstanding of the actual state of affairs. Giambologna takes a statuette to show to Michelangelo, and he thinks he’s just a poor Flemish nobody, wanting a pat on the head. But Michelangelo takes one look at Giambologna and what he sees is a threat. In fact Michelangelo hallucinates. What he sees is a gleaming, nude bronze warrior, a sort of glistening David, striding into the studio with some kind of weapon in his hands, and he thinks: Oh, so I’m supposed to be Goliath, am I? And he seizes the weapon and crushes it with all his might. And the hallucination passes, and he sees that it’s just that Flemish twerp who keeps pestering….

Giambologna emerges from his meeting with Michelangelo, with the wax model still warm from the worker’s hand. He can’t believe that Michelangelo, whom he had worshiped as a god, could have been so perfectly foul to him. He feels sorry for himself as a foreigner. He thinks: He wouldn’t have behaved like that if I’d been a Florentine; the bastard just said to himself, Who does this Flemish twerp think he is? And so he walks on through a Rome with which he is now distinctly out of love, the Rome which had once seemed to him like the Land of Green Ginger, until he comes to the small tavern where he and several of his countrymen live. And it’s evening, and his friends are at table and they call out to him: Hey, Jean, how did it go? And then they say: Oh, like that, was it? And Giambologna takes a taper and goes up to his room, lights a lamp and places the little model on the table, the model that he had made to his own design and finished so beautifully.

And he thinks: It’s so banal, that advice—first learn to model before you learn to finish. It’s like saying learn to walk before you learn to run. Who needs it? What’s the point? Why set yourself up as a genius if that’s the best that you can do?

And then he thinks: Who’s he to talk about modeling, anyway? The Bacchus looks as if it’s going to fall over. The David ’s got one leg longer than the other. Who’s he to talk about modeling. And the thought of the injustice of it makes him throw his shoes across the room with such force and one of his countrymen comes up to see what’s wrong.

And Giambologna says: “Michelangelo’s idea of modeling, I mean, his idea of modeling , is sticking a couple of breasts on a bloke to make a woman. That’s his idea of modeling!”

And the friend says: “Yes, Jean, yes, come and have a drink.”

But Giambologna says: “He talks about learning to model before you learn to finish. I mean—what does he know about finishing? When was the last time he ever finished anything? Tell me! When?”

“Sistine Chapel?” says the friend, but Giambologna doesn’t hear.

“The façade of San Lorenzo is a disgrace. The tomb of Julius is just a fragment. He doesn’t even bother any more, he thinks he’s so clever he can leave half the block untouched.”

“You’re right,” says the friend, “he’s a complete tosser. Now come on down.” But Giambologna stays upstairs, calmer now that he has fallen out of love with Rome and out of love with Michelangelo, now that the scales have fallen from his eyes. And from time to time he goes over to the table, and examines the little bozzetto , and really it’s not entirely bad, it’s just that it’s full of all the things that Giambologna now can’t stand about Michelangelo.

And soon without knowing it he is biting his lower lip, and working away at the red wax, till it becomes malleable again. And now he begins to revise the figure according to his way of thinking, reducing the gigantism of the muscles, giving the features an elegance and brio, working away with his finest tools until every centimeter of surface is brought to the most beautiful finish he has ever achieved.

Dawn comes. He can hear the shepherds making their way up the Janiculum, singing their peasant songs to their clanking flocks. And now all the bells of Rome begin to ring. It sounds like the introduction to the last act of Tosca . It is the introduction to the last act of Tosca . Giambologna feels a surge of hope once again. He thinks he will be able to excel anyone in his art.

And he is right to think so, for his mental apprenticeship to that angry genius has come to an end. Giambologna will become sculptor to the Medici. His works will be like a sort of diplomatic currency, given only to princes, distributed the length and breadth of Europe. He has taken Michelangelo’s advice, but he has rejected the spirit of that advice. His works will be known, yes, for the bravura of their modeling, but they will be known above all for the brilliance of their finish.

March 23, 1995

Subscribe to our Newsletters

More by James Fenton

John Singer Sargent saw into the souls of his models, whether they were society women, nude men, or lower-class Venetians. How did he do it?

May 9, 2024 issue

In the English garden, eccentricity and variety went hand in hand.

April 6, 2023 issue

May 14, 2020 issue

James Fenton is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 to 1999 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize in 2015. He is the author of School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts and Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968–2011 . (May 2024)

Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie de’ Professori del Disegno…Florence 1681–8 (1846).  ↩

Michael Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings (Yale University Press, 1988), p. 19.  ↩

Vasari, Lives of the Artists , translated by George Bull (Viking Penguin, 1988).  ↩

W. R. Valentiner, Studies of Italian Renaissance Sculpture (London: Phaidon, 1950), p. 134.  ↩

W. H. Auden, Juvenilia: Poems 1922–1928 , edited by Katherine Bucknell (Princeton University Press, 1994), p. xx.  ↩

Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences , edited by C. E. Norton (Everyman, 1932; reprint of the 1881 edition), p. 360.  ↩

Robert Gittings, John Keats (Atlantic Monthly Press/Little, Brown, 1968), p. 167.  ↩

Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford University Press/Clarendon Press, 1989), pp 326–328.  ↩

Gittings, John Keats , p. 167.  ↩

‘ Between two worlds’: Byron’s Letters and Journals , Vol. VII, 1820, edited by Leslie A. Marchand (John Murray, 1977), pp. 200,202.  ↩

Marchand, ‘ Between two worlds ,’ p. 225.  ↩

Gittings, John Keats , p. 168.  ↩

Gittings, John Keats , p. 250.  ↩

John Keats, letter to J.A. Hessey, October 8, 1818.  ↩

Francis Steegmuller, editor, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857 (Harvard University Press/Belknap Press), p. 100.  ↩

November 19, 2020 issue

February 11, 2021 issue

November 5, 2020 issue

Corn Crowfoot, Corn Buttercup

April 9, 2020 issue

Evening Trains

February 27, 2020 issue

April 23, 2020 issue

November 21, 2019 issue

The Disease of Nature

August 20, 2020 issue

Subscribe and save 50%!

Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App.

Already a subscriber? Sign in

Michelangelo

Michelangelo was known as il divino , (in English, “the divine one”) and it is easy for us to see why.

Learn about some of the materials and techniques Michelangelo employed.

• Quarrying and carving marble
• Carving marble with traditional tools
• Almost Invisible: The Cartoon Transfer Process

videos + essays

Replicating Michelangelo

Replicas form a vital component of Michelangelo’s legacy, and they have helped transform him into a global cultural icon

Can stone be that soft? Contrast defines this sculpture. Mary is sweet but strong, and Christ, real yet ideal.

Where’s Goliath? David scans for his enemy. This colossal sculpture is itself a giant of 16th-century Renaissance art.

The many meanings of Michelangelo's David

Location, location, location. Meant for the cathedral, David presided over a public square—and now stands inside.

Unfinished business—Michelangelo and the Pope

Michelangelo left many sculptures unfinished, but perhaps none are more beautiful than the slaves.

The Hebrew prophet at the center of this tomb exudes energy and power, from his intense gaze to his twisted pose.

Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

God created the world in seven days, but it took Michelangelo four years to depict it on this remarkable ceiling.

Studies for the Libyan Sibyl

Michelangelo transforms a male model into a female figure. Discover the artist’s working process.

Slaves for the Tomb of Pope Julius II

Bound to rock, these figures struggle to escape their marble prisons. One closes his eyes; the other looks to God.

Last Judgment , Sistine Chapel

As demons harvest new souls and angels wake the dead, Mary crouches, powerless beside Christ.

Medici Chapel (New Sacristy)

Night and day, rough and polish—this chapel embodies opposition and traps the viewer in a moment of transition.

Laurentian Library

Michelangelo turns book learning on its head. Defying classical grammar, he speaks his own architectural language.

Attributed to Daniele da Volterra, Michelangelo Buonarroti , c. 1545, oil on wood, 88.3 x 64.1 cm ( The Metropolitan Museum of Art )

“Who was Michelangelo?”

Essay by Dr. Tamara Smithers

Michelangelo Buonarotti—the Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, and poet—was called “Il Divino” (The Divine One) by his contemporaries because they perceived his artworks to be otherworldly. His art was in high demand, and thought to have terribilità , poorly translated as “terribleness” and better described as powerfulness. He was mythologized by followers, emulated by artists, celebrated by humanists, and patronized by a total of nine popes. As commemorations, over one hundred portraits of him were created during the sixteenth century alone, far more than any other artist at the time. Despite three biographies written about the artist during his own lifetime, we know the most about the sometimes-generous and often-humorous perfectionist through his letters. Not only do we have more primary sources on Michelangelo than any other historical artist, he is one of the most written-about artists of all time. In today’s terms, Michelangelo was a workaholic homebody whose cats missed him when he was away. He did not like to debate art, waste time, or show his work before he was ready. Despite a few mid-career collaborations, Michelangelo was careful and guarded, never running a typical workshop, locking his studio, and burning drawings. He also complained a lot, and, at times, could be overconfident, curt, and blunt, once resulting in a punch in the nose.

Better late than never

Although he became an artistic superstar, Michelangelo’s start was different from most artists of his time. His initial success can be credited to his family’s connections to the powerful, noble Florentine family, the Medici. In the early 1490s, he learned carving under the tutelage of a student of Donatello , Bertoldo di Giovanni, at the Medici sculpture garden. Upon entering the workshop of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio , Michelangelo began his official professional training at the age of thirteen, several years later than usual (and unlike typical apprentices who had to pay to study under a master, Michelangelo was paid, perhaps due to his family’s relations to the Medici or his innate talent). However, he desired to sculpt instead, stating that he drank in his love of stone carving from his wet nurse , who came from a family of simple pastoral stonecutters.[1] To emphasize this aspect of himself for the first few decades of his career, he signed his letters “Michelangelo Sculptor.” Also important to his formative years was the dissection of cadavers to learn anatomy. The challenging conditions—after hours by candlelight and without refrigeration—called to only the most dedicated artists.

Michelangelo, Pietà , marble, 1498–1500 (Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome. Photo: Stanislav Traykov , CC BY 2.5)

At twenty-three years old, Michelangelo accepted his first large-scale public project: to carve two full-scale figures within one piece of stone, a very difficult task. St. Peter’s Pietà , commissioned for the tomb of Cardinal Bilhères de Lagraulas, initiated his rise to fame. The pressure was on: the contract stated that the sculpture was to be the most beautiful work in Rome. After six months at the quarries to find the perfect marble, Michelangelo began carving the Pietà . When the sculpture was put on display in Old St. Peter’s Basilica (before the rebuilding initiated by Pope Julius II), pilgrims questioned who had made such a beautiful work. As the story goes, the sculptor overheard a group incorrectly attribute the work to another sculptor. Michelangelo snuck back in late that night with a lantern, hammer, and chisel to carve his name on the Virgin’s sash. It is the only work he ever signed, and he later regretted this act of excessive pride.

Already famous

Michelangelo, David , marble, 1501–04 (Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence)

Soon after, Michelangelo received an important commission in Florence. A figure of David was desired for up high on an outside buttress of the Duomo . He was tasked to re-use a nearly twenty-foot tall piece of marble nicknamed “The White Giant” that another artist had attempted but failed to carve forty years prior. Michelangelo stepped up to the challenge, completing the colossal statue in two years. In the end, the sculpture was placed outside the Palazzo Signoria .

The success of David led to a large-scale civic commission inside the palazzo to paint a battle scene for the Florentine government, the Battle of Cascina . This arrangement placed him in direct competition with Leonardo , who was already at work on the Battle of Anghiari on the opposite wall. While neither painting was ever finished, copies of both survive. Michelangelo’s cartoon (a full-scale preparatory drawing for the fresco), served as a sort of art school for younger artists who came to copy his figures. His drawings from this period are some of his most superbly rendered figures, with a distinct cross-hatching chiaroscuro technique. Disegno , or drawing, was considered both a manual pursuit and an intellectual endeavor and was the most important part of his practice. Sketching from the male nude was central to his art making.

Michelangelo, Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (detail), 1508–12 (Vatican, Rome)

In his next major fresco project, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel commissioned by Pope Julius II , the main narrative represents nine stories of the Book of Genesis, such as the Creation of Adam . Michelangelo’s bulky, muscular figures were inspired by the ancient Laocoön , which he witnessed being unearthed in Rome in 1506. The study for the Libyan Sibyl is an exquisite preparatory drawing from this time, revealing his use of a male model for a female figure.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Studies for the Libyan Sibyl (recto), c. 1510–11, red chalk, with small accents of white chalk on the left shoulder of the figure in the main study, 28.9 × 21.4 cm ( The Metropolitan Museum of Art )

Michelangelo began painting the ceiling with the traditional method of using cartoons to transfer the design onto the wet plaster, but he became so proficient towards the end, he worked freehand. He also claimed to work without assistants (despite evidence otherwise), and preferred to keep his work private until finished. One story relays that he threw planks at Pope Julius II from the scaffolding, mistaking him for a spy![2]

Michelangelo, AB XIII, 111 Sonnet and self-portrait, 1509/1512 (Casa Buonarotti, Florence)

The ceiling took Michelangelo over four years to paint. Initially, he did not want the commission, claiming that painting was not his art. He wrote a satirical poem about his personal struggle paired with a caricature of himself standing to paint: “With my beard towards heaven… I am bent like a Syrian bow….”[3]

Michelangelo, Creation of Adam , ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (detail), 1508–12, Vatican, Rome

Mid-Career but not middle of the pack

Michelangelo was initially called to Rome in 1505 to carve the tomb of Julius II intended for the center of New St. Peter’s Basilica , soon to be under construction. If fully realized, the monument would have contained over forty life-size figures, impossible for Michelangelo to ever have finished. The memorial was finally erected, in a reduced form in 1545, as a wall tomb in S. Pietro in Vincoli in Rome.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Moses , 1513–15, Carrara marble, 254 cm (8 feet, 3 inches) high, Tomb of Pope Julius II (della Rovere), 1505–45, San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome (photo: Jörg Bittner Unna , CC BY 3.0)

The monumental Moses , intended for an upper corner, is now featured as the main figure. Two series of figures were never placed in the final arrangement: two bound “ slaves ” in the Louvre Museum in Paris and four struggling “captives” in the Accademia Museum in Florence. The Captives , likely carved in the 1520s, are bulky, block-like, and rough, where one can see the artist’s cross-hatching marks made with the gradina , a multi–toothed chisel . His preferred tool, the cane , a dog-toothed chisel, left distinct groove lines on the surface of the marble. Because of the roughness, these, and other sculptures, have been labeled non-finito , or unfinished, a topic much debated in scholarship.

From left to right: Michelangelo, Slaves (commonly referred to as the  Dying Slave and the  Rebellious Slave ), 1513–15, marble, 2.09 m high (Musée du Louvre, Paris, photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0); Captives (commonly referred to as the Atlas Captive and the Bearded Captive ), c. 1530–34, marble, 2.77 m and 2.63 m high (Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Michelangelo traveled back and forth from Rome and Florence during the late 1510s and 20s. In Florence, he worked for Julius’ successor, Pope Leo X de’ Medici, on the façade of the family’s church, San Lorenzo, which was never completed. It was here, though, where he honed his entrepreneurial skills, managing hundreds of workers under his direction. Michelangelo continued Medici employment under Pope Clement VII, designing the Laurentian Library and the New Sacristy .

Michelangelo, Tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, 1526-33, marble, 630 x 420 cm (New Sacristy, San Lorenzo, Florence) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In 1527, during a period of political turmoil, the Florentine Republic took back control from the Medici. Two years later, the city came under siege by troops of Holy Roman Empire and the Medici were reinstalled. Despite his longtime connections to the family, Michelangelo, a republican at heart, left Florence forever in 1534.

Michelangelo, Last Judgment , Sistine Chapel, altar wall, fresco, 1534–1541 (Vatican City, Rome) (photo: Richard Mortel, CC BY 2.0)

Late life in the Eternal City

Michelangelo’s second fresco in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the Last Judgment , was commissioned by Pope Paul III and was painted between 1535 and 1541. It also functioned as a study tool for artists. Giorgio Vasari, the sixteenth-century artist and biographer, claimed that artists no longer needed to study live models from nature since every conceivable human position was represented in Michelangelo’s fresco. To accomplish this, Michelangelo positioned tiny wax models to help develop the complex, large-scale composition. Reliance on Michelangelo’s contorted figures by later artists resulted in a sense of artificiality, a prized characteristic of Mannerism . The artist was constantly developing new working practices. For example, in order to extend working hours, Michelangelo made a headlamp with a special wax candle so he could paint into the late hours of the night, often forgetting to eat. Long days proved dangerous though, and he took a bad fall off the scaffolding, nearly breaking his leg.

Left: Michelangelo, Piazza and palazzi of the Capitoline Hill, Rome, 1536–1546 (photo: Lawrence OP , CC BY-NC-ND 2.0); Right: Michelangelo, Dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, Rome, 1546–1564 (photo: Steven Zucker , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Michelangelo became a Roman citizen in 1537, and it was here that he established his legacy as an architect. During the last two decades of his long life, Michelangelo focused on architectural commissions, sculpting only for himself. His major projects included renovating the Capitoline Hill and overseeing the construction of St. Peter’s (without pay for not only the salvation of his soul but also to retain complete creative control). As a devout Christian, Michelangelo made pilgrimage to all of Rome’s seven martyr churches during his old age. As he aged, he became more and more stubborn, riding his horse in the rain, for example. Owning horses was seen as an aristocratic endeavor, a status the artist became increasingly concerned with over the years. In his 1553 biography by Ascanio Condivi written with the artist’s consultation, Michelangelo emphasized his family’s nobility as a descendent of the counts of Canossa.

Michelangelo, Pietà for Vittoria Colonna, c. 1538–44, black chalk on paper, 28.9 x 18.9 cm ( Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum , Boston)

The artist never had children (he claimed his artworks were his children), or even proper students. Instead, he sought to groom his nephew Lionardo as the sole Buonarotti heir. Michelangelo also established many great friendships such as that with Vittoria Colonna, whom he gifted a devotional Pietà drawing. He turned to this theme for his own tomb memorial, now known as the Florentine Pietà . Michelangelo attempted to carve four figures out of one marble block, a nearly impossible task. This act was in direct competition with the famed ancient Laocoön , which, despite legend, was discovered by the artist to have been made of several pieces of stone. Here, Mary holds the dead Christ with Mary Magdalene on the left and Nicodemus behind them, figures who each witnessed the death of Christ. Michelangelo carved his self-portrait in the face of Nicodemus, placing himself over Christ in a last wish for salvation. In the end, this image did not adorn his tomb. However, he continued to carve almost daily up until his death in 1564; an onlooker described the eighty-something year old’s blows with a hammer as incredible.

Michelangelo, Deposition (The Florentine Pietà ), c. 1547–55, marble, 2.26 m high (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen , CC-BY 2.5)

The Florentine Art Academy, founded under the leadership of Vasari a year before Michelangelo died, erected the largest funerary memorial for an artist to date, naming him the father of the arts. Artists throughout the ages—from Caravaggio to Bernini, to Reynolds to Rodin , to Picasso to Hockney—looked to the art of Michelangelo as the founder of a forceful, new figural style. Michelangelo elevated the status of the artist more than any other artist of his time. He valued artistic freedom and personal expression, making art his way. Only with this in mind, can his creative vision and legend truly be appreciated.

Michelangelo’s tomb, Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence (photo: Walwyn , CC BY-NC 2.0)

• Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects , vol. IX, translated by Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1912, p. 4–5).
• Ibid, p. 25.
• James Saslow, trans. The Poetry of Michelangelo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 70.

Additional resources:

Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects in English translation at Project Gutenberg

Second edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects in Italian at Archive.org

Virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo’s design for the Tomb of Pope Julius II della Rovere at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

See more pictures of the Medici Chapel (New Sacristy)

James Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1986) 

Francis Ames-Lewis and Paul Joannides, eds. Reactions to the Master: Michelangelo’s Effect on Art and Artists in the Sixteenth Century (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2003)

Umberto Baldini and Perugi Liberto, The Complete Sculpture of Michelangelo (London. Thames and Hudson, 1982) 

Carmen C Bambach, et. al, eds., Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman & Designer (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017)

Leonard Barkan, Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) 

Bernadine Barnes, Michelangelo and the Viewer in his Time (London: Reaction Books, 2017)

Paul Barolsky, Michelangelo’s Nose: A Myth and its Maker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997)

______ , The Faun in the Garden: Michelangelo and the Poetic Origins of Italian Renaissance Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994)

Anscanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo . Edited by Hellmut Wohl. Translated by Alice Sedgwick Wohl. 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999)

Robert J. Clements, Michelangelo: A Self-Portrait (New York: New York University Press, 1968)

Charles De Tolnay, Michelangelo: Sculptor, Painter, Architect (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)

Rona Goffen. Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) 

Marcia B. Hall, ed.  Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo . 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1974)

Deborah Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) 

Lisa Pon, “Michelangelo’s Lives : Sixteenth-Century Books by Vasari, Condivi, and Others.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1997): 1015–1037.

Pina Ragionieri and Gary M. Radke, Michelangelo: The Man and the Myth , exhibition catalogue. Translated by Christian and Silvia DuPont (Syracuse, NY: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

James M. Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991)

Tamara Smithers, ed., Michelangelo in the New Millennium (Boston: Brill, 2016)

______ , The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo: Artistic Sainthood and Memorials as a Second Life  (New York and London: Routledge, 2023)

David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)

Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects . 10 vols. Translated by Gaston du C. De Vere ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1912)

______ , Lives of the Artists . 2. vols. Translated by George Bull (London: Penguin, 1965)

William E. Wallace, Michelangelo, God’s Architect: The Story of his Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece . Princeton: Princeton University, 2019. 

______ , Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and His Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 

______ , Michelangelo: The Complete Sculpture, Painting, Architecture (New York: Universe, 2009)

______ , ed. Michelangelo, Selected Scholarship in English : Life and Early Works . 5 vols. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995)

Your donations help make art history free and accessible to everyone!

The Renaissance – Michelangelo

This essay will provide an overview of the Renaissance, a pivotal period in European history known for its cultural, artistic, and intellectual rebirth. It will discuss the origins and development of the Renaissance, its major figures and achievements, and its impact on various fields such as art, literature, science, and philosophy. The piece will also explore the socio-political context of the era and how it contributed to the emergence of the modern world. Additionally, PapersOwl presents more free essays samples linked to Humanism.

How it works

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection”- Michelangelo (BrainyQuote). The Renaissance, which took place during the early 1300s to 1600s, was a period of big changes in European society where advances in art and literature were made (Esko). It was a time when people began to think of themselves as individuals, with God-given power to shape and control their destiny and environment. In Italy, it was thought as a rebirth of the ideas and energy of ancient Rome (Fitzpatrick).

During the Renaissance, there were three main values that people focused on individualism, humanism, and secularism. Individualism was seen as having one’s own path whereas humanism is the concept that human, rather than God, is the center of the universe. Secularism, on the other hand, is the rejection of religion (Esko).

The Renaissance includes exploration, scientific revolution, reformations, and politics. It also embraces education and philosophy, patronage, and art and architecture. Copernicus, for example, is an astronomer that developed a different understanding of the universe while proving Ptolemy’s theory wrong. He created a different idea that the universe is heliocentric by using rational thoughts and relying on mathematics (Brady). Another example of what the Renaissance was that Renaissance artists used realistic, rounded figures, and natural poses to convey humanism. Leonardo Da Vinci was an artist who created the painting Mona Lisa that depicted stronger emotions than medieval paintings. In his painting, he had well-defined landscapes and 3-D figures filled with emotions that convey humanism, portraying the human body as a thing of beauty (Brady). The Renaissance is an important period in European society because it was a time that created new ideas about discovery, trade, invention, art, philosophy and the world. Not only did these accomplishments during the Renaissance paved the way for future advancements, but it also developed a new perspective of the world. The art techniques that were created during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries produce a different style of art that would still be used today.

The Renaissance was a ‘rebirth’ of science and culture. Michelangelo Di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, Republic of Florence, into a minor nobility family in Florence and died on February 18, 1564. Michelangelo’s father was an administrator of the small dependent town of Caprese at the time of his birth and had several government jobs. Unfortunately, Michelangelo mother died when he was only six. At the time of the Renaissance, Florence, located in Northern Italy, was the largest city in Europe in the 15th century and an independent republic governed by wealthy merchants and guilds. It was the heart of the Renaissance movement and its atmosphere of prosperity and freedom allowed the artistic and intellectual community to flourished (Fitzpatrick). Since Florence was producing great painters and sculptors at this time, it allowed Michelangelo to become a Renaissance artist after being apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, learning fresco painting and establishing his own foundational principles of his art (Buonarroti). During the Renaissance, Michelangelo was an Italian Renaissance artist, painter, architecture, and poet. In 1494, when the Medici family was overthrown, Michelangelo moved to Bologna where he was hired to carve a small figure sculpture figure that was needed to complete the tomb and shrine of St. Dominic.

As the project led to other projects, Michelangelo became very successful in his field. Two of his most successful sculptures, the Piet?  in 1498 and David in 1503, which served as a symbol of the Florentine Republic, allowed him to firmly establish his public reputation (Britannica). Along with David, Michelangelo was considered one of the greatest artists of all time, his works ranking among the most famous in existence. A Renaissance Idol is a person who shows all three main values of the Renaissance; individualism, humanism, and secularism. They are a person who is knowledgeable in many different fields and can do it all. During the Renaissance, a Renaissance Idol was either a scientist, inventor, artist, engineer, explorer, architect, or writer (Esko). Michelangelo is proven to be a Renaissance Idol because he was skillful as a sculptor, painter, architecture, and poet. He is also able to show individualism, humanism, and secularism in his artworks and sculptures. Michelangelo’s artwork had religious scenes that show real pain, joy, and all emotions. His figures were realistic and not “glorified”. Although Michelangelo was a successful artist, he was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio when he was thirteen and had many patrons throughout his career, with Pope Julius II being the main one. Because Michelangelo was so devoted to making his work perfect, numerous projects remained unfinished (Buonarroti).

Michelangelo Buonarroti best represents and is the true Renaissance idol because he shows: individualism thought out his life as Renaissance artists, humanisms when analyzing his detailed works, and secularism when looking at his sculptures. Michelangelo is qualified as the Renaissance Idol because he shows individualism throughout his life as a Renaissance artist. Individualism means having one’s own path or being famous, which Michelangelo was able to do. At the beginning of Michelangelo’s career, his father wanted him to take part in their family’s financial business. However, he decided to go against his father and became apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlando instead (Britannica). Michelangelo became an artist and followed his own path despite his father’s disapproval. He didn’t want to be held back by his father and lived up to his potential as an artist. Michelangelo also demonstrated individualism through his sculpture, David. The sculpture portrays a young man with a youthful face and heavily muscled adolescent standing assuredly, ready to battle. In David, an example of Michelangelo’s studies of anatomy can be seen through the muscles and veins that was closely modeled like a human body (High Renaissance). In Michelangelo’s sculpture, he displayed physical realism and facial expressions filled with emotions, showing individualism. David shows that he is capable of great accomplishments and achievements. Similarly, individualism emphasizes the moral worth of an individual.

Another reason Michelangelo qualifies as the Renaissance Idol is because he shows humanism when analyzing his detailed artworks. For instance, Michelangelo’s Piet  created for the French cardinal Jean Villiers depicted Jesus after he was removed from the cross resting upon the lap of Mary. What’s particular about this sculpture is that Michelangelo made Jesus very lifelike, making it appear as if Mary’s hand is creasing the realistic flesh under Jesus arm (High Renaissance). The way Jesus was sculpted emphasized the beauty and glory of his human form. It was classical humanism in its ideals of physical beauty. The Last Judgment located at the end of the wall of the Sistine Chapel was another painting done by Michelangelo that shows humanism. “The design functions like a pair of scales…both directed by Christ, who ‘conducts’ with both arms; in the two top corners are the cross and other symbols of the Passion, which serve as his credentials to be judge” (Michelangelo). All of the people in the paintings depicted some kind of emotions on their face according to where they were judged to go in the afterlife. Michelangelo also depicted nudity in The Last Judgement, presenting the human body as a thing of beauty in its own right.

The Last Judgement painting shows actual humanistic traits that exquisitely displays beauty through an idealized human form. Among many of Michelangelo’s great masterpiece, several of them exhibited secularism. David, created in 1505, did not only show individualism, but also secularism. David is a sculpture of a young man with a confident look and strong stance. His stance, along with his perfectly depicted body, shows that he is determined and confident. He also possesses the muscles that everyone wanted to have (Buonarroti). Secularism encourages people to enjoy life instead of being concerned with faith and salvation in the afterlife, and David is a perfect depiction of this. Michelangelo also conveys secularism in the Creation of Adam located at the end of the Sistine ceiling. It shows a muscular classical nude of Adam extending his hand to God. In the painting, while God is being surrounded by angels and cherubim, there is a red cloud shape that resembles the human brain (Michelangelo). This shows that ideas can also come from the human brain too, not just God.

This represents secularism because it shows interest in an idea that is not religious. In conclusion, Michelangelo was one of the greatest artists of all time, creating artworks that show the characteristics of a Renaissance idol. Michelangelo Buonarroti best illustrates the characteristics and ideals of a genuine Renaissance Idol because of showing individualism as a Renaissance artist, humanism throughout his artworks, and secularism when analyzing his successful projects. As an Italian Renaissance artist, Michelangelo showcased an idealized and higher vision of reality. “His adeptness with human emotionality and expression inspired humility and veneration. The psychological insight and physical realism in his work had never been portrayed with such intensity before” (Nichols). Many buildings, sculptures, and paintings across the world were inspired by him. Michelangelo impacted the Renaissance Movement through his sculpture and art, influencing future societies and modern western society today.

Cite this page

The Renaissance - Michelangelo. (2019, Oct 05). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/the-renaissance-michelangelo/

"The Renaissance - Michelangelo." PapersOwl.com , 5 Oct 2019, https://papersowl.com/examples/the-renaissance-michelangelo/

PapersOwl.com. (2019). The Renaissance - Michelangelo . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-renaissance-michelangelo/ [Accessed: 19 Apr. 2024]

"The Renaissance - Michelangelo." PapersOwl.com, Oct 05, 2019. Accessed April 19, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/the-renaissance-michelangelo/

"The Renaissance - Michelangelo," PapersOwl.com , 05-Oct-2019. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-renaissance-michelangelo/. [Accessed: 19-Apr-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2019). The Renaissance - Michelangelo . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-renaissance-michelangelo/ [Accessed: 19-Apr-2024]

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Hire a writer to get a unique paper crafted to your needs.

Our writers will help you fix any mistakes and get an A+!

Please check your inbox.

You can order an original essay written according to your instructions.

Trusted by over 1 million students worldwide

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

We use cookies to enhance our website for you. Proceed if you agree to this policy or learn more about it.

• Essay Database >
• Essay Examples >
• Essays Topics >
• Essay on Michelangelo

Good Essay About Michelangelo And Identity In His Artworks

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Michelangelo , Identity , Art , Artists , Human , Works , Artwork , Development

Words: 1400

Published: 03/30/2023

ORDER PAPER LIKE THIS

The Early Modern Times brought a lot of innovations into the people’s life. It was the epoch of the great discoveries when Columbus found the way to American and Ferdinand Magellan managed to sail across the Earth. Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings depicted the possible advancements in the technology. Besides, it was the time for great thinkers and philosophers: Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, and many other participants of the Reformation shed light on the contradictory aspects of the institution of church and change the perception of religion in the whole Europe. The art also flourished during the Early Modern. This period is sometimes called the Renaissance because many artists rediscovered the standards of the Latin and Roman antiquity and implemented those ideals in their paintings and sculptures. Michelangelo Buonarotti was one of the most talented sculptors and painters of his time and in his artworks he demonstrated the contemporary views on good and evil, beauty and other values. With the help of his artworks Michelangelo Buonarotti contributed to the formulation of the identity of the Early Modern individual as well as influenced the development of the philosophical thought of his time. Michelangelo belongs to one of the most famous sculptors and artists of all times. His artworks are considered to be the perfect examples of the Early Modern period. Moreover, his works did not only demonstrate the reconsideration of the ideals of ancient times but also provided an insight into the understanding of the author’s and individual’s identity. Michelangelo’s sculpture David serves as a perfect illustration of these principles. It was carved in 1501 when the sculptor received a huge block of marble to work with. The result of his work was supposed to be placed in Florence on a buttress of the north tribune of the main cathedral and accompany other figures erected there before (Paoletti 294). In his book Michelangelo's David: A Search for Identity Charles Seymour points out on the symbolical and philosophical meaning of the figure. He “illustrates the multiple meanings of the David as prophet, as symbol of freedom for the Florentine citizens, as Adam, as Hercules, as colossus, and as self-portrait” (Paoletti 295). On the one hand, David is the biblical character who managed to gain a victory over giant Goliath. On the other hand, he is the symbol of the Florentine success in the relations with Medici family. Further, he is a hero and symbolizes the fame and dignity with his posture. Therefore, David is a representation of the changed identity of the Early Modern personality. The symbolic meaning can be seen not only in the form of sculptures and paintings but also in such s big form as architecture. For example, Burroughs in his article “Michelangelo at the Campidoglio: Artistic Identity, Patronage, and Manufacture” writes how the political, artistic and philosophical views of Michelangelo are combined in the buildings: “The giant order itself, finally, serves to pull together the two stories; when the facade is viewed at a raking angle, the Ionic order disappears from sight among the protruding bases of the Corinthian pilasters” (101). This example of deconstruction means that the dualistic identity of the author is clearly reflected in his works. Besides, the building of the Palazzo dei Conservatori described above, shows the ambiguous position of the Roman citizen elite, which was considered to be in solidarity with the common people but on the other hand, was acknowledged and treated as the aristocracy. This dualism was depicted in construction of the building by Michelangelo. Moreover, this moment also demonstrates that the artistic identity of the author cannot be viewed without the consideration of other part which creates it: the political, the philosophic, etc. The interpretation of the individual’s role in the history and his/her own life can be seen in the other artwork by Michelangelo, Creation of Adam. According to many scholars, the painting shows how God imparts the soul in the human body with his divine touch. However, after the careful analysis Boyle offers another theory to explain the hidden symbolism if the episode. According to her, the Lord with his gesture requests the human being to stand erect (992). This theory demonstrates highlights two main religious features which were remarkable during the Early Modern Age. God does not have his fists clinched, so he is considered to be a commander and adviser for people. This implies the changes in the people’s attitude to the church. As it is known the power of the religious institution became less and was not absolute as it was during the medieval time. Another important thing which is implied in the picture is that the human being is standing in front of the Lord. This episode demonstrates the dignity and the respect which was proclaimed by the representatives of the Renaissance. The artworks of Michelangelo, mainly, his sculptures provide another insight into the development of the philosophical thought of the Early Modern Period. When the sculptor was asked how he created his carving he replied that everything is done by “chipping away the excess in order to release the figure that was already there trapped in the stone” (Forbes 130). According to Carabell, “Michelangelo's method of carving involved modeling contours into the depth of the stone, always pushing back from a frontal position” (93). Both these description refer not only to the way the sculptor worked, but also reflect a deep philosophic idea – everything a person wants to be is already inside him/her. The individual needs only to find the excessive features of his/her character and work with the virtues. This simple idea demonstrates that Michelangelo considered that the identity of a person can be realized with the help of the constant work by eliminating all the possible disadvantages and by highlighting the positive elements. This thought is close to the desire for perfection. The perfection, in turn, is something that Early Modern artists strived to achieve and show in their works. Carabell writes that for Michelangelo “identity is established as an ongoing process that must, by definition, remain unfinished” (100). Therefore, the artist formulates another philosophic idea with the help of his works: the identity of individual cannot be fully completed. Michelangelo is a great example of a man of the Early Modern period. He was the talented sculptor, artist and architect. The significance of his works can hardly be overestimated. Michelangelo formulated the high standards for the art of sculpture. Moreover, his works imply a deep philosophic thought behind them. Therefore, it can be said that the genius of Michelangelo provides a great contribution to the development and understanding of identity. His sculptures and frescoes are filled with humanistic values and principles. In every piece of his artwork he showed dignity and respect to the people. This position contrasted to the one which proposed the disdainful attitude to people from the clergy and authorities. The artworks of Michelangelo prove the value of every human life and thus proclaim the humanistic views and the change in the artistic identity as well as in the perception of self among other human beings. The humanistic values which were offered by Michelangelo made his contribution valuable even in the modern times. His assumption that craving shoud remove everything except the most important can be applied to the modern business and ideas of self-development. Therefore the impact of Michelangelo on the identity can be traced and should be used even in 21st century.

Works Cited

Boyle, Marjorie O'Rourke. Senses of Touch: Human Dignity and Deformity from Michelangelo to Calvin. Vol. 71. Brill, 1998. Burroughs, Charles. "Michelangelo at the Campidoglio: Artistic Identity, Patronage, and Manufacture." Artibus Et Historiae 14.28 (1993): 85. Web. Carabell, Paula. "Image and identity in the unfinished works of Michelangelo." RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 32 (1997): 83-105. Forbes, Raymond L. "Michelangelo's Message." Journal of Arts and Humanities 1.1 (2012): 130. Paoletti, John T. Rev of Michelangelo's David: A Search for Identity, Seymour, Charles, Jr. The Art Bulletin 51.3 (1969). Web

Cite this page

Share with friends using:

Removal Request

Finished papers: 2106

This paper is created by writer with

If you want your paper to be:

Well-researched, fact-checked, and accurate

Original, fresh, based on current data

Eloquently written and immaculately formatted

275 words = 1 page double-spaced

Get your papers done by pros!

Other Pages

Draw topic writing ideas from this research paper on formation of the constitution of the united states, the name of the university research paper examples, draw topic writing ideas from this essay on adults should not be limited in their access to the internet, expertly crafted essay on what do you think of pauls partying and the whole party scene he got caught up in, expertly written essay on rocky the movie to follow, the honda case exemplar question answer to follow, case study on brannigan foods, expertly written case study on porters 5 forces case report of the air express industry to follow, market structures and cost management question answer example, kendall regional medical center disaster plan a sample essay for inspiration mimicking, reading post 6 essay to use for practical writing help, a level essay on leadership discussion for free use, free leadership discussion essay sample, criminal conduct and criminal law essay you might want to emulate, free research paper on child development, free causes of terrorism in africa research paper sample, good example of essay on leadership discussion chapter 7, expertly crafted essay on leadership discussion chapter 8, good example of st anselms ontological argument critical thinking, comparing and contrasting the ottoman and the mughal empire essays examples, good example of research paper on mastercard company analysis, orpheus human after all essay, expertly written essay on appendicitis to follow, accountable care organization example essay by an expert writer to follow, free essay about competitive advantage, exemplar critical thinking on sprint coms waste management plan to write after, snapple case study analysis research papers examples, pedagogical documentation essay example, homeless families essay examples, a gendered analysis of sir gawain and the green knight essay samples, draw topic writing ideas from this critical thinking on science, free women in law enforcement and military women officers essay sample, jarana essays, thutmose essays, thutmose iii essays, albees essays, alan moore essays, line personnel essays, nchs essays, bullard essays, emancipator essays, radical republicans essays.

Password recovery email has been sent to [email protected]

Use your new password to log in

You are not register!

By clicking Register, you agree to our Terms of Service and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Now you can download documents directly to your device!

Check your email! An email with your password has already been sent to you! Now you can download documents directly to your device.

or Use the QR code to Save this Paper to Your Phone

The sample is NOT original!

Short on a deadline?

Don't waste time. Get help with 11% off using code - GETWOWED

No, thanks! I'm fine with missing my deadline

• Environment
• Information Science
• Social Issues
• Argumentative
• Cause and Effect
• Classification
• Compare and Contrast
• Descriptive
• Exemplification
• Informative
• Controversial
• Exploratory
• What Is an Essay
• Length of an Essay
• Generate Ideas
• Types of Essays
• Structuring an Essay
• Outline For Essay
• Essay Introduction
• Thesis Statement
• Body of an Essay
• Writing a Conclusion
• Essay Writing Tips
• Drafting an Essay
• Revision Process
• Fix a Broken Essay
• Format of an Essay
• Essay Examples
• Essay Checklist
• Essay Writing Service
• Pay for Research Paper
• Write My Research Paper
• Write My Essay
• Custom Essay Writing Service
• Admission Essay Writing Service
• Pay for Essay
• Academic Ghostwriting
• Write My Book Report
• Case Study Writing Service
• Dissertation Writing Service
• Coursework Writing Service
• Lab Report Writing Service
• Do My Assignment
• Buy College Papers
• Capstone Project Writing Service
• Buy Research Paper
• Custom Essays for Sale

Can’t find a perfect paper?

• Free Essay Samples

Michelangelo

Updated 03 January 2023

Subject Artists ,  Medieval Europe

Downloads 54

Category Art

Topic Art History ,  Michelangelo ,  Renaissance

Michelangelo stands tall among the most prestigious and acclaimed Italian experts of the Renaissance period, both in his own time and as modern-day examples of craftsmanship. The David statue and the Sistine Chapel frescoes are two of the most convincing works that have influenced the reach of craftsmanship and have remained the finest (Keizer 305). Without a question, considering the extent Michelangelo gave to the world of art, the Renaissance growth in Europe and Italy would have been uneventful if he had not been a part of it. Conceived in 1475 6 of March and demised 89 years after, Michelangelo was a talented and adept Florentine individual in various zones of workmanship, including being an artist, engineer, painter, and stone carver. Described as one of the best of all circumstances in craftsmanship, he impacted western art altogether (Hornik 453). Therefore, other than discussing the paintings and sculptures of Michelangelo; the Sculpture of David, the Sistine Chapel painting, and the Adam sculpture, it is as well imperative to outline the relation with its architectural, social, economic, political, and historical contexts, as well as the related aesthetics of art. Michelangelo was an incredibly young craftsman by 1501 when he was appointed with the fathers of Florence, constrained by the energy of the capacity he could convey, to shape the loved statue of David. Very motivated by the old Greek artistry, much the same as numerous specialists, Michelangelo blossomed with this topic of Christianity, aside from that he went a step higher, past the capacities of his peers. By and large, despite the fact that he was a staunch Catholic, he opposed the social and conventional religion focused painting, and his veering into familiar subjects of art is the thing that activated ability in numerous various specialists to advance what they knew best in the train. Subsequently, the humanist development that described the medieval period in Europe amid the Renaissance was motivated by such brassy endeavors from Michelangelo (Hornik 456). However, most intriguing is the capacity of Michelangelo not be made a divine being, yet instead, to making a saint out of marble into an unending man, the sculpture of David, which was an understanding of the male Greek legend of Renaissance standing bare. The aspects of beauty, taste, as well as art, are pertinent to the philosophical study of aesthetics, which in uniformity are inclined toward recognize the measure and significance of beauty in art. Both the sensory-emotional and the subjective values otherwise referred to as the judgments of taste and sentiment are critical components of aesthetics in the art (Kirwan 15). Nevertheless, following the evolution of the human aspects of social life, aesthetics too has been changing in meaning, and currently the phrase has a broader meaning in its definition; whereby apparently aesthetics in art encompass not only the elements of culture and nature but also the critical reflection on the subject of art (Friedrich 35). The term aesthetics was coined and first used in the ninetieth century by one Alexander Baumgarten, the German philosopher, and in the then context it meant the appreciation of beauty and the principles of nature that embrace and critically demystify visual art. Nevertheless, philosophically arguing, aesthetics in art had been used by Michelangelo and his peers in their time, and it refers to the artistic taste and beauty embodied in such genre. In this relation, many British artists who lived in the twentieth century including one Richard Hamilton had a lot to deliver when it comes to aesthetics in art. Richard Hamilton cherished and thrived significantly in the pop art, as at all times he remained focused, determined and visionary about the genre. Indeed, Michelangelo did a lot about the art industry by laying the background and made the aesthetic art an admirable element of art, considering the feeling he caused in his audience and the emotional attraction he spurred among his contemporaries in his Florence and beyond (Friedrich 231). At a critical look, it is evidenced by scholarly data that Michelangelo was the most acclaimed figure in aesthetic art, and he was such expanded in his business, transformations in culture and traditional beliefs, utilized mass production, as well as being witty in life. The city of Florence had a compromised leadership, with its security at stake following the constant attacks from neighboring dynasties. Therefore, the creation of the statue of David would allude to the biblical defiant young man by the same name, and this was a clear demonstration of the new courage, defiance, and the audacity in the willingness to meet the any under any circumstances. While most artists who had depicted David in their art focused on the icon after he slew Goliath, which had become a unique tradition in the industry, Michelangelo decided to apply an all distinctive approach; he chose to design the statue of David, just before he could meet the giant enemy (Keizer 308). The essence of this timing was very critical because then it would bring out the true meaning of the anxiety that characterized the moment. In revelation, Michelangelo through his art had the power to launch a new phase of human thought and experience in how difficult and challenging situations were to be handled in life about its architectural, social, economic, political, and historical contexts. It was then clear that humanity was not cowed away from the imminent challenges, rather, devising ways out of diversity, and not yielding to the paralysis that anxiety imposes and fear it subjects people to, instead, rising outside of the crowd and defending one's position was a paradigm shift that marked the new beginning. The right hand of the statue as was architecture by Michelangelo was relatively more significant than the left arm, a show of the might, the willingness, and the potential that was in phase, to soon inscribe a signature of hope before humanity, curve a new trajectory to trickle down in history in lieu of fiction, and this would control and deliver the shape and the new destiny of the newfangled world (Hornik 455). In essence, Michelangelo had no interest in carving the best portray of marble to depict the iconic David, instead, he was focused on delivering a new hope, vision, and a formidable vision for civilization which had faced threats for the last one hundred decades, without making tangible progress beyond superstition. Therefore, the statue of David after the artistic touch by Michelangelo gave rise to a new Europe, a continent that marked its development from dark ages since then to a more robust architectural, social, economic, political, and historical contexts. Perhaps this confirms the reason as to why Michelangelo is configured as the father of Renaissance. Therefore, other than being an indispensable embodiment of leadership, Michelangelo was an icon that shaped the realities of the new world, and ushered in a distinctively new epoch to define the future that runs in the modern day, not only continental Europe but beyond. Indeed, David was a magnificent piece of art whose influential sparks radiated their impact up to as far as the western society lasting into the present day world (Anirudh 5). In 1508, Michelangelo single-handedly offered to paint the Sistine and the altar wall of the Vatican chapel. He did a lot in the preceding four years, as by then he had painted over 400 life-sized biblical figures while lying on his back and using the most sophisticated medium of fresco painting. Even though this could appear unheard of, what is even more perplexing is the unique touch of content he tailored to mirror every single presentation of the biblical scenes he worked on tirelessly (Deimling 244). All the bodies were full of life, proportional, and well presented, as he did not only sculpt, but he also did the painting to obtain an all refined product, appealing to all eyes, even that that recognized the least principles of art. Though during the dark ages the Christian art was what mattered and characterized the culture of art, Michelangelo`s work was to mark a new phase in the industry. The European art was revolutionized, given a new meaning, and reinvigorated to a different level, as was influenced by Michelangelo`s painting of the Sistine Chapel (Deimling 245). The painting of Adam is a fresco that is very magnificent in the chapel, as it tells volumes about the original creation of God, the human person. The figure is a show of Adam and God almost reaching his hand, a figurative portrayal that depicts the closeness and the vivid communication that so candidly defined the times in antiquity. Below are the paintings and sculptures of Michelangelo; figure 1, 2, and 3 the Sculpture of David, The Sistine Chapel painting, and The Adam sculpture respectfully; Figure 1 Sculpture of David by Anirudh 2015 Figure 2 The Sistine Chapel painting by Anirudh 2015 Figure 3 The Adam sculpture by Anirudh 2015 When it comes to the Scholarly Concepts Michelangelo on Aesthetics in Art Diction, and the correct use of language, as well as painting, have always been the primary challenge experienced by scholars to appropriately define what aesthetic in the art should be well perceived. Despite the lack of perfect abilities to make the aesthetic description a more perfect and empirical portray of art, it remains cardinal that the judgment should not be compromised and hence should remain more intuitive across the text and at all levels. Indeed, it has been confirmed across millennia that the segment of aesthetics is very paramount to any piece of art, and that beauty, art, and taste are irresistible inseparable in its exploration. For instance, based on the argumentative presentations in the paint by Michelangelo; both the common human truth and the atmosphere of a subject beauty in the experience of judgment should be embraced while redefining the authenticity in the discipline of aesthetics in the art (Kirwan 23). Moreover, on the contrary, Arthur Schopenhauer asserts that the critical analysis and presentation of aesthetic art should be characterized with phenomenal beauty in its freest and pure human intellect, hence the beauty in entirety therein (Kirwan 12). In essence, through the practical scrutiny of the aesthetics of art, the discipline of art is lifted to a superior platform of human caption and hence the ease of understanding as the eventual embrace by the human emotion based on the work Michelangelo did in Florence. Indeed, the artwork that is aesthetically interesting is the painting culture by one Michelangelo. When he came into the limelight, there was a lot of controversy in his time, as to whether art was to be commercialized or to be distinct and held as separate from business (Grimes 19). Nevertheless, Michelangelo was a tough, highly sophisticated, experienced, and well-exposed person, who through his talent and experience compelled his peers and his audience to be capable of appreciating diversity and a multifaceted approach. He was capable of convincing the society that the commercial approach was such a lucrative and indispensable mechanism for making the field of art thrive and hit new heights like never before. Indeed, based on scholarly evidence, there has not been witnessed such a massive experience of artistic influence in Florence in the industry to date (Kirwan 14). It is true that while Michelangelo lived and even posthumously, his art of painting did not only reach the levels of a massive movement but also remained to be a way of life among the different communities that count his contribution as exceedingly phenomenal. He bound his audience to embrace popular culture, whereby immersion in art. Michelangelo was capable of technically orchestrating and paving the way for the bridging the gap between consumer culture and high art, considering his towering and unmatched alignment (Grimes 19). Based on this critical scrutiny, reason evidently dictates that just like any other refined artist who showed versatility and full command of what they knew best in the industry, Michelangelo was no mean icon when it came to his abilities to delivering not only quality but also what was deemed as relevant for the moment it pumped into his diverse audience (Rueger 365). Furthermore, Michelangelo acted as the platform, a background upon which other artists came up in the industry. Many developed their respective careers from aping and embracing what Michelangelo taught them through his aesthetics as part of his audience. Michelangelo was such an icon in the art industry and his outstanding position in how well he did what the audience needed perhaps explain in volumes why he projects that meaning that painting art undoubtedly originated from Florence (Grimes 19). Michelangelo was among the daring young architects, artists, and critics in Florence, who came out boldly and with passion, to claim the new role of visual arts in the training of that finest artist to uphold, including household appliances (Guyer 135). The aesthetic value of Michelangelo`s art that made it even more fascinating that some of the core ideas he utilized were imported from the contemporary culture of the day. He assaulted other themes of art to come up with a new touch of the ultimate beauty of the industry, that is so phenomenal in his art of imagery (Rueger 364). There was a lot based on the arguments made by scholars in need for the demystification of aesthetics in the art which was entailed in reaching this decision that made art by Michelangelo in Florence be acclaimed as one of the most aesthetically interesting artwork. While many consider the judgment of beauty and taste as the core of aesthetics in art, Michelangelo is very phenomenal in his express arguments that sense of taste surpasses all forms of aesthetic art scrutiny. While considering the contribution of the British sentimentalist in the traditional antiquity, Kant argues that both universality and subjectivity are indispensable elements that could characterize the judgment of taste in an artwork (Guyer 135). By subjectivity, Kant alludes to the inevitable feeling of either pleasure of displeasure, or even a mix of the two while interacting with a given piece of art. Therefore, subjectivity distinguishes empirical judgment from the judgment of taste. While the judgment of test could be of not only nature but also test, both beauty and ugliness are key aspects therein. Other than the elements above, while scrutinizing Michelangelo`s artwork for critical judgment, the aspect of normativity arises in his aesthetics. Indeed, Kant notes that the aspect of universal validity is core and the ultimate platform to acquire while dealing with the pleasure and beauty principal, hence the evidenced special elements of the judgment of taste in Michelangelo`s Florence art (Kaizen 113). On the other hand, the elements of normativity and pleasure emerge as the litmus test for the judgment of taste in Michelangelo`s art. This is because the prediction of the beauty of this art without necessarily making a reflection on the pertinent responses would be meaningless. Consequently, the attention and influence his art spurred in his audience are very key when it comes to the analogy of Kant in his judgments (Shaviro 199). Therefore, both the perceptions of taste and the empirical judgments portray both the inner and external responses that paint a picture of the beauty or ugliness of Michelangelo`s art. In conclusion, therefore, Michelangelo thrived in the Florentine art and constituted what made his work the most aesthetic of the time. He broke down the orthodox distinctions between high and popular culture, individuality as well as mass production in the art industry. Furthermore, the inception of works like sculpture and painting then helped a great deal in boosting the energies put in place by other artists to critically and charismatically factor out the domain of his position in art. Michelangelo used many art platforms to come to the top of art culture, including religious and communal arena among others. The strategy was to hit a wide audience and very first, to overcome any come pressure that could so hold him behind at the moment. Perhaps it could be noted that then, Michelangelo had taken a new approach, and what he was trying to put across was a new recipe. The reception of his content was unprecedented, and hence the need for him to must have come up with full energy, a natural and opportunistic momentum that even propelled him further. The other strategic mechanism Michelangelo embraced to make his art the most desirable was accessibility, the prices of his products were conveniently regulated, so that those who could not understand the painting and sculpturing culture of art he generated at relatively expensive prices had the products at affordable prices, hence increasing access to his audience and wielding convenience and fame in his favor. Everything was new and diverse in the pieces of art presented by Michelangelo. He made sure that both object and subject became one thing in the industry (Wenzel 2). By so doing, it became a core strategizing move that worked vehemently in his favor. The visual and audial entities of his presentation were maximized on what the audience could perceive as neutrality. Therefore, the art of Michelangelo was the most aesthetic in his time. Notwithstanding, he towered above his contemporaries not only in Florence but also in his European home turf, and this gave him an opportunistic bearing in the industry that worked to his advantage in eventuality. The subject of aesthetics in the art thus comes out conspicuous in the art of Michelangelo. Works Cited Anirudh. “10 Most Famous Works By Michelangelo _ Learnodo Newtonic.” 2015: 1–15. Web. Deimling, Barbara. “Early Renaissance Art in Florence and Central Italy.” The Art of the Italian Renaissance: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Drawing. N.p., 1995. 244–246. Print. Friedrich, Wilhelm. “Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775—1854)lling, F.” 2014: 1–890. Web. Grimes, William. “Richard Hamilton, British Painter And a Creator of Pop Art, Dies at 89.” New York Times (2011): 19. Web. Guyer, Paul. “Review: Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics.” Mind 111.442 (2002): 363–366. Web. Hornik, Heidi J. “Michelangelo and the Reform of Art.” Perspectives in Religious Studies 27.4 (2000): 452–456. Web. Kaizen, William R. “Richard Hamilton’s Tabular Image.” October 94 (2000): 113. Web. Keizer, Joost. “Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Subject of Art.” Art Bulletin 93.3 (2011): 304–324. Web. Kirwan, James. The Aesthetic in Kant. N.p., 2006. 1-78 Web. Rueger, Alexander. “Kant and the Aesthetics of Nature.” British Journal of Aesthetics 2007: 138–155. Web. Shaviro, Steven. “Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics.” Common Knowledge. Vol. 17. N.p., 2011. 198–199. Web. Wenzel, Christian Helmut. An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems., 2008. 1-88 Web.

Deadline is approaching?

Wait no more. Let us write you an essay from scratch

Related Essays

Related topics.

Find Out the Cost of Your Paper

Type your email

By clicking “Submit”, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy policy. Sometimes you will receive account related emails.

Home — Essay Samples — Arts & Culture — Italian Renaissance — Comparing Michelangelo and Donatello’s Depictions of David

Comparing Michelangelo and Donatello's Depictions of David

• Categories: Art History Italian Renaissance

About this sample

Words: 685 |

Published: Mar 6, 2024

Words: 685 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Michelangelo's david, donatello's david, style and symbolism.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

• Expert in: Arts & Culture

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

4 pages / 1764 words

3 pages / 1288 words

6 pages / 2638 words

4 pages / 1753 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Italian Renaissance

Seven Floors is a thought-provoking and complex novel written by Italian author Dino Buzzati, which explores the psychological and existential themes of human existence. The novel is divided into seven distinct floors, each [...]

The Birth of Venus, painted by Sandro Botticelli in the 1480s, is a masterpiece that has captivated art enthusiasts and scholars for centuries. This iconic painting, which depicts the goddess Venus emerging from the sea, has [...]

The Renaissance period, which spanned from the 14th to the 17th century, was a time of great cultural and artistic advancements in Europe. During this period, artists, scholars, and thinkers sought to revive the classical ideals [...]

Niccolò Machiavelli and Desiderius Erasmus were two influential thinkers of the Renaissance period, each offering their unique perspectives on politics, morality, and human nature. While Machiavelli is often associated with his [...]

The Creation of Adam is a fresco painting created by Michelangelo Buonarroti, or more commonly known as Michelangelo. The well-known painter of the renaissance era lived throughout Italy from 1475 to 1564. After being born in [...]

Humanism, as a philosophical and cultural movement, emerged in Italy in the 14th century and spread throughout Europe during the Renaissance. Humanists believed in the power of reason, individualism, and the potential for human [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free