Michelangelo (1475-1564)
By Michael Hughes
Essay
Michelangelo has been called the sole winner of art’s “triple crown:” sculpture, painting, and architecture. He helped bring Renaissance period art to its height and culmination, and his influence has periodically been an inspiration in new styles all the way to the present. Michelangelo’s accomplishments in art now overshadow his authorship of over 300 poems, some of which were influential in the development of the Italian sonnet and modern Italian language.
Michelangelo’s childhood hardly promised such significance. He was born in an obscure village to a minor official with pretensions of nobility and a mother whom he hardly knew by her untimely death. Modern diagnoses suggest he was autistic, and he was often considered antisocial. He had to fight his father to become a student of painting.
Michelangelo’s brief artistic training ended when he was taken into the household of the Medici family of bankers and nobles. Both his first sculpture (small reliefs) and later his first architecture (Florence’s Medici Chapel and innovative Laurentian Library) were created under Medici patronage. Yet Michelangelo would later stand against this powerful family in two pro-republican revolutions.
Michelangelo and the Medicis did agree that they were taking part in a rebirth of European civilization. Its founders sought direction from artists and philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome for this “renaissance.” But they also believed that divine inspiration was necessary to achieve maximum human potential, explaining Michelangelo’s belief that while God alone can create life, God grants to human beings the parallel ability to create art. This philosophy perhaps encouraged his determination to choose his own themes despite objections from some patrons.
Michelangelo’s relations with his peers could also be strained--though he often supported young painters, male and female. He traded insults with Leonardo da Vinci after Leonardo disparaged sculptors as mere laborers. But the rivalry between Michelangelo and Raphael, who acknowledged Michelangelo’s influence, was much more civil.
Michelangelo’s competitiveness often involved ecclesial commissions, which financed many of his major accomplishments. The first such work was his career-changing Vatican Pietà. In Rome, Michelangelo would create for the popes the first planned city center in Europe since ancient times and the master plan of St. Peter’s Basilica. He also sculpted two papal tombs and painted two papal chapels, the latter despite his protests that he was no painter.
The paintings in one chapel, the Sistine, proved controversial. They expressed what were then radical concepts about women, equality, propriety, and the individual. Michelangelo in The Creation of Man depicted Adam confidently reaching out to participate with God in his own completion. In contrast, the later Last Judgment - contemporary with Protestant beliefs - depicted even the saintly as humbled, naked, and redeemed solely by Christ.
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings display no signatures. He had so conspicuously signed his early Sistine Madonna that he resolved to never again put himself above art that glorified God. Consequently, scarcely a work of this most famous of artists bears his name.
Recommended Reading
Bull, George Anthony, Michelangelo: A Biography. St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Gayford, Michael, Michelangelo: His Epic Life. Fig Tree, 2013.
Heusinger, Lutz, Michelangelo [The Library of Great Masters]. Scala/Riveside, 1989. (Out of print.)
Sala, Charles, Michelangelo: Sculptor, Painter. Architect Terrail, 1996. (Out of print.)
Resources for Youth
Cagno, Gabriella di, with illustrations by Boni, Simone, and Galante, Louis R., Michelangelo [Masters of Art series.] Peter Bedrick Books, 1996. (Ages 9-12.)
McLanathan, Richard, Michelangelo [First Impressions series.] Harry N. Abrams, 1993. (Out of print) (Ages 10 and up.)
Spence, David, and Krailing, Tessa, Michelangelo and the Renaissance [Great Artists series.] Barron’s Educational Series, 1997. (Out of print) (Ages 9-12.)
Stanley, Diane, Michelangelo. Harper Collins, reprint 2003. (Ages 4-8.)
Michael Hughes
Dr. Michael Hughes is a retired university lecturer and an author and editor in the fields of American and world history, art history, and American Indian studies. He has portrayed eleven historical figures (including Alexander Graham Bell, Jim Bridger, William Lloyd Garrison, Michelangelo, Ernie Pyle, and Orson Welles) for humanities councils, state park services, historical societies, and the Library of Congress. Michael has depicted characters in seven states and spoken at workshops and events in seventeen. He previously appeared in Greely in 2014 as Cherokee Chief John Ross and is delighted to be back. His wife, Eril Hughes, is a professor of English.
Bullet Points
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Michelangelo was the first person in history to simultaneously be a master of the three visual arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. He is considered (along with Leonardo) as one of the two most influential artists of all time.
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Michelangelo is the sole person to have worked in and helped develop all three phases of Renaissance art: Early Renaissance, High Renaissance, and Mannerist. His earliest work still reflects the Middle Ages while his late work helped lay the groundwork for the radically different Baroque style.
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Michelangelo’s paintings for the Sistine Chapel are perhaps even now the world’s largest and grandest artistic achievement by one person.
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Michelangelo’s updated plan for St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican largely defines that structure today−especially through his design for what remained until nearly the 20th century the world’s greatest dome. He also promulgated the concept of the “centralized plan” in architecture, which is still much in use.
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Michelangelo was influential in the development of modern European languages and of modern poetry (including the sonnet). He is regarded in particular as one of the creators of present-day Italian.
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Michelangelo took part in the political and religious changes that took place during the Early Modern period of western civilization. These developments included the unification of Italy and the rise of the modern nation state and the cultural and theological changes that took place with the Protestant Reformation. (The concepts of the Protestant Reformation are literally visible in Michelangelo’s second Sistine Chapel project).
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Michelangelo’s skepticism and his questioning of authority were part of and reflective of the rise of modern consciousness and identity during the Renaissance.
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Michelangelo’s life involved several “hot button” issues that remain timely. These issues include dealing with disabilities (Michelangelo was likely on the autism spectrum), gay and lesbian identity (though circumstantial evidence may point to his personal celibacy), and the changing status of women (in which in some respects he was centuries ahead of his time).
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