Michelangelo : The Entombment

Michelangelo - The Entombment

Michelangelo abandoned this painting when he left for Florence in the spring of 1501. The theme of Christ’s body being lifted up, prior to being carried to the tomb, is combined with the motif of the dead Christ presented to the viewer for pious meditation. Even at this late stage, however, Michelangelo still omits the wounds in Christ’s hands, feet and side. Christ is supported on the left by the long haired St. John the Evangelist in his canonical red gown. The others are probably Nicodemus, and Joseph of Arimathaea who gave up his tomb for Jesus. The figure kneeling below St. John is probably Mary Magdalene, who is shown meditating on the crown of thorns and the nails of the Crucifixion. The woman at the back right is a Holy Woman (Mary Salome). The missing figure on the lower right was to be the Virgin Mary mourning her son.

The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel , The Vatican Rome.Michelango.

                 The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel , The Vatican Rome.Michelango.

In 1505, Michelangelo was invited  to Rome by the newly elected Pope Julius II. Though commissioned to build the Pope's tomb. Under the patronage of the Pope, Michelangelo experienced constant interruptions to his work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks. Because of those interruptions, he worked on the tomb for 40 years. The tomb, of which the central feature is Michelangelo's statue of Moses, was never finished to Michelangelo's satisfaction. It is located in the Church of S. Pietro in Vincoli in Rome.
During the same period, Michelangelo took the commission to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took approximately four years to complete (1508–1512). Michelangelo was originally commissioned to paint the 12 Apostles against a starry sky, but lobbied for a different and more complex scheme, representing creation, the Downfall of Man and the Promise of Salvation through the prophets and Genealogy of Christ. The work is part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel which represents much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church.

The composition eventually contained over 300 figures and had at its center nine episodes from the Book of Genesis, divided into three groups: God's Creation of the Earth; God's Creation of Humankind and their fall from God's grace; and lastly, the state of Humanity as represented by Noah and his family. On the pendentives supporting the ceiling are painted twelve men and women who prophesied the coming of the Jesus. They are seven prophets of Israel and five Sibyls, prophetic women of the Classical world.

Among the most famous paintings on the ceiling are The Creation of Adam, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Great Flood, the Prophet Isaiah and the Cumaean Sibyl. Around the windows are painted the ancestors of Christ.

Libyan Sybil by Michelangelo The Sistine Chapel,The Vatican,Rome

Libyan Sybil by Michelangelo The Sistine Chapel,The Vatican,Rome

Michelangelo's Pietà in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican is a depiction of the body of Jesus on the lap of his mother Mary after the Crucifixion, was carved in 1499, when the sculptor was 24 years old.

                                         
                                     Michelangelo's Pietà in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.

Michelangelo's Pietà, a depiction of the body of Jesus on the lap of his mother Mary after the Crucifixion, was carved in 1499, when the sculptor was 24 years old.

In November 1497, the French ambassador in the Holy See commissioned one of his most famous works, the Pietà, and the contract was agreed upon in August of the following year. The contemporary opinion about this work – "a revelation of all the potentialities and force of the art of sculpture" – was summarized by Vasari: "It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh."

Leda and the Swan by Michelango National Gallery, London

Leda and the Swan by Michelango : National Gallery, London

The Holy Family with the infant St. John the Baptist (the Doni tondo) 1506 by Michelango

St. John the Baptist (the Doni tondo) 1506 by Michelango

The Doni Tondo or Doni Madonna, sometimes called The Holy Family is the earliest of only three surviving panel paintings by  Michelangelo  and the only one to be finished.Located in the Uffizi in Florence, Italy, in its original frame, the painting was probably commissioned by Agnolo Doni to commemorate his marriage to Maddalena Strozzi, the daughter of a powerful Tuscan family.The painting is in the form of a tondo, or round frame, which is frequently associated during the Renaissance with domestic ideas.
She can be seen as in a motherly way, and also as a regal and royal woman. The work was most likely created during the period after the Doni's marriage in 1503 or 1504, as well as after the excavation of the Laocoön about 1506, yet before the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes were begun in 1508, dating the painting to approximately late 1506 or 1507.The Doni Tondo features the Christian Holy family (the child Jesus, Mary, and Saint Joseph) along with John the Baptist in the foreground and contains five ambiguous nude male figures in the background. The inclusion of these nude figures has been interpreted in a variety of ways.

The Virgin is the most prominent figure in the composition, taking up much of the center of the image.
 Mary sits directly on the ground  to better communicate the theme of her relationship to the earth.
The grass directly below the figure is green, which sharply contrasts to the grassless ground surrounding her, although the green is now darker and less visible than it was originally.
Joseph has a higher position in the image compared to Mary, as the head of the family. Mary is located between his legs, as if he is protecting her. There is some debate as to whether Mary is receiving the Christ child from Joseph or vice-versa. John the Baptist is a traditional inclusion of Florentines in works depicting the Madonna and Child.He is in the middle-ground of the painting, between the Holy Family and the background. The elements around the family include plants and perhaps water.
The painting is still in its original frame, one that Michelangelo might have influenced or helped design.The frame is ornately carved and rather unusual for the five heads it contains which protrude three-dimensionally into space. Similar to the nudes of the background, the meanings of these heads has been subject to speculation. The frame also contains carvings of crescent moons, stars, vegetation, and lions’ heads. These symbols are, perhaps, references to the Doni and Strozzi families, taken from each one’s coat of arms. As depicted on the frame, “the moons are bound together with ribbons that interlock with the lions,” possibly referencing the marriage of the two families.
There is a horizontal band separating the foreground and background, whose function is to separate the from the background figures and St. John the Baptist. The background figures are five nudes, whose meaning and function are subject to much speculation and debate. The Holy Family is much larger in size than the nudes in the background, and there appears to be water in between the land where the Holy Family and the nudes are situated. The Holy Family all gaze at Christ, but none of the nudes look directly at him.The far background contains a landscape.

David 1504 by Michelango

The Statue of David (1504) is one of the most renowned works of the Renaissance.

Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1499–1501. Things were changing in the republic after the fall of anti-Renaissance Priest and leader of Florence, Girolamo Savonarola, (executed in 1498) and the rise of the gonfaloniere Piero Soderini. He was asked by the consuls of the Guild of Wool to complete an unfinished project begun 40 years earlier by Agostino di Duccio: a colossal statue portraying David as a symbol of Florentine freedom, to be placed in the Piazza della Signoria, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Michelangelo responded by completing his most famous work, The Statue of David, in 1504. This masterwork, created out of a marble block from the quarries at Carrara, one that had already been worked on by an earlier hand, definitively established his prominence as a sculptor of extraordinary technical skill and strength of symbolic imagination.

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

Portrait of Michelangelo by Jacopino del Conte

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564) was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci.
His output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. As an architect, Michelangelo pioneered the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library. At 74 he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan, the western end being finished to Michelangelo's design, the dome being completed after his death with some modification.
In a demonstration of Michelangelo's unique standing, he was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. Two biographies were published of him during his lifetime; one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino ("the divine one"). One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.

Early Life of Michelangelo

Portrait of Michelangelo by Jacopino del Conte

Michelangelo was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese near Arezzo, Tuscany.(Today, Caprese is known as Caprese Michelangelo). For several generations, his family had been small-scale bankers in Florence, but his father, Ludovico di Leonardo di Buonarotto Simoni, failed to maintain the bank's financial status, and held occasional government positions. At the time of Michelangelo's birth, his father was the Judicial administrator of the small town of Caprese and local administrator of Chiusi. Michelangelo's mother was Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena.The Buonarrotis claimed to descend from the Countess Mathilde of Canossa; this claim remains unproven, but Michelangelo himself believed it.Several months after Michelangelo's birth, the family returned to Florence, where Michelangelo was raised. At later times, during the prolonged illness and after the death of his mother in 1481 when he was just six years old, Michelangelo lived with a stonecutter and his wife and family in the town of Settignano, where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm. Giorgio Vasari quotes Michelangelo as saying, "If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures."
Michelangelo's father sent him to study grammar with the Humanist Francesco da Urbino in Florence as a young boy.The young artist, however, showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of painters. At thirteen, Michelangelo was apprenticed to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio.When Michelangelo was only fourteen, his father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay his apprentice as an artist, which was highly unusual at the time.When in 1489, Lorenzo de' Medici, de facto ruler of Florence, asked Ghirlandaio for his two best pupils, Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci.From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo attended the Humanist academy which the Medici had founded along Neo Platonic lines. Michelangelo studied sculpture under Bertoldo di Giovanni. At the academy, both Michelangelo's outlook and his art were subject to the influence of many of the most prominent philosophers and writers of the day including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Poliziano. At this time, Michelangelo sculpted the reliefs Madonna of the Steps (1490–1492) and Battle of the Centaurs (1491–1492). The latter was based on a theme suggested by Poliziano and was commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici. While both were apprenticed to Bertoldo di Giovanni, Pietro Torrigiano struck the 17-year-old on the nose, and thus caused that disfigurement which is so conspicuous in all the portraits of Michelangelo.