Michelangelo And The Viewer In His Time

Today most of us enjoy the work of famed Renaissance artist Michelangelo by perusing art books or strolling along the galleries of a museum—and the luckier of us have had a chance to see his extraordinary frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But as Bernadine Barnes shows in this book, even a visit to a well-preserved historical sight doesn’t quite afford the experience the artist intended us to have. Bringing together the latest historical research, she offers us an accurate account of how Michelangelo’s art would have been seen in its own time. As Barnes shows, Michelangelo’s works were made to be viewed in churches, homes, and political settings, by people who brought their own specific needs and expectations to them. Rarely were his paintings and sculptures viewed in quiet isolation—as we might today in the stark halls of a museum. Instead, they were an integral part of ritual and ceremonies, and viewers would have experienced them under specific lighting conditions and from particular vantages; they would have moved through spaces in particular ways and been compelled to relate various works with others nearby. Reconstructing some of the settings in which Michelangelo’s works appeared, Barnes reassembles these experiences for the modern viewer. Moving throughout his career, she considers how his audience changed, and how this led him to produce works for different purposes, sometimes for conventional religious settings, but sometimes for more open-minded patrons. She also shows how the development of print and art criticism changed the nature of the viewing public, further altering the dynamics between artist and audience. Historically attuned, this book encourages today’s viewers to take a fresh look at this iconic artist, seeing his work as they were truly meant to be seen.

In this vividly written biography, William E. Wallace offers a substantially new view of Michelangelo.

In this lively, original book, illustrated with photographs of the recently restored work, Barnes analyzes the Last Judgment and the historical context in which it was created and received. She broadens our view of Michelangelo and his creative process and offers new insight into one of his greatest works.

By following steps by which Michelangelo arrived at his inventions, the author questions conventional notions of spotaneity as a function of genius. Rather, she explores the idea of drawing as a mode of thinking, using its evidence to reconstruct the process by which Michelangelo arrived at new ideas.

Consummate painter, draftsman, sculptor, and architect, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was celebrated for his disegno, a term that embraces both drawing and conceptual design, which was considered in the Renaissance to be the foundation of all artistic disciplines. To his contemporary Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo was “the divine draftsman and designer” whose work embodied the unity of the arts. Beautifully illustrated with more than 350 drawings, paintings, sculptures, and architectural views, this book establishes the centrality of disegno to Michelangelo’s work. Carmen C. Bambach presents a comprehensive and engaging narrative of the artist’s long career in Florence and Rome, beginning with his training under the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio and the sculptor Bertoldo and ending with his seventeen-year appointment as chief architect of Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. The chapters relate Michelangelo’s compositional drawings, sketches, life studies, and full-scale cartoons to his major commissions—such as the ceiling frescoes and the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, the church of San Lorenzo and its New Sacristy (Medici Chapel) in Florence, and Saint Peter’s—offering fresh insights into his creative process. Also explored are Michelangelo’s influential role as a master and teacher of disegno, his literary and spiritual interests, and the virtuoso drawings he made as gifts for intimate friends, such as the nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna, the marchesa of Pescara. Complementing Bambach’s text are thematic essays by leading authorities on the art of Michelangelo. Meticulously researched, compellingly argued, and richly illustrated, this book is a major contribution to our understanding of this timeless artist.

'. . . Michelangelo was constantly flaying dead bodies, in order to study the secrets of anatomy, thus beginning to give perfection to the great knowledge of design that he afterwards acquired.' Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelangelo, 1568.Michelangeo's art is exhilarating, but also bewildering. What is the source of its incomparable power? In this imaginative and detailed study, the art critic James Hall explores some of the major puzzles - the unmaternal nature of Michelangelo's Madonnas and their lack of responsiveness; his concern with colossal scale and size; the way that anatomical dissections affected his attitude to the human body; the passionate, anxious placing of solitary, heroic figures against a background of troubling crowds. In the process he arrives at a more precise appreciation of the body language of his figures, and offers new explanations of many of the most familiar sculptures, paintings and drawings, including the statue of David and the narratives of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the complex iconography of the Medici tombs in the Sacristy of San Lorenzo and his powerful late images of the dead Christ. Hall dispels the notion of an artist-superman possessed of titanic mental and physical powers, embodying the sublime spirit of his age, and also topples the long-held view of Michelangelo as brilliant but unbalanced, obsessed with the male nude. Instead he redefines him as the first artist to put the human body centre stage, giving his study a profound relevance to our own time, in which artists, film-makers, writers and scholars are so fixated on 'the body'. If we really want to understand our own culture, Hall argues, we need to understand Michelangelo. This fine, elaborate study offers us a way to do so.

The name Michelangelo instantly conjures up the Sistine Chapel, the David, the Pieta and countless other great works. In his History of Italian Painting, the French writer Stendhal remarked that, “between Greek antiquity and Michelangelo nothing exists, except more or less skilled forgeries”. In Promenade in Rome, Chateaubriant expresses his admiration for the refined lines of the Pieta. A number of great writers such as Manzoni view Michelangelo as one of the indisputable Masters of the western revival in art. The work of Michelangelo has, indisputably, stood the test of time. How was he able, in so few years, to develop the methods behind a body of work worthy of his Greek predecessors? Often referred to as a superhuman and a creative genius, Michelangelo was an incomparable artist of the Italian Renaissance and is often ranked alongside Leonardo da Vinci in terms of influence and achievement. In this work, Jean-Matthieu Gosselin explores Michelangelo’s many identities: sculptor, architect, painter and draughtsman.

The life of Michelangelo told through the stories of six of his masterpieces