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Michelangelo: Artists
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Unlike Leonardo, Michelangelo was of noble birth. His father, Ludovico di Buonarotti, sent his son to be raised by a stone carver and his wife, since his mother was too ill to nurse him. It was because of this arrangement that the young boy learned to carve. Michelangelo later wrote, "When I told my father that I wished to be an artist, he flew into a rage, saying that 'artists are laborers, no better than shoemakers.' " His father wanted him to be a man of letters, a scholar of higher learning. When Michelangelo finally convinced him to allow him to apprentice to be an artist, his talent emerged in very little time. He went on to study at the sculpture school in the Medici gardens, and when Lorenzo de Medici recognized his talent, was invited live in the Medici household.
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With its somber, world-weary gaze, the realistic bronze sculpture gives you the feeling that Michelangelo is present in the room. And in a sense, he is, as both an artist and as a patriarch of a family who actively promoted the artist's fame after he died.
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Michelangelo "was rudely masculine in his behavior and in the strength of his style and conceptions." explains Hartt. with remarkably little feminine influence. The enormous mass of documents and sixteenth-century literary sources concerning the artist contain not a single reference -- beyond their mere names -- either of his mother or of the woman his father married when the boy was ten. From the very beginning, Michelangelo's character seems to have been shaped by the constant stress of a family of men .... The alternating phases of unbounded generosity and affection toward men, and sullen, silent suspicion, seem to reflect the rivalries of a male-dominated environment."
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Celebrated during his lifetime for his extraordinary talent as a sculptor, architect, painter, draftsman, and poet, Michelangelo inspired subsequent Florentine artists and attracted the city’s most powerful patrons—notably the Medici grand dukes. Their extensive and enlightened patronage allowed art in all media to flourish. In addition to commissioning portraits and decorative objects for private and public display, the Medici family ordered the reconstruction or renovation of numerous civic buildings and private residences and established several major institutions for artistic production and instruction, including Europe’s first artists’ academy.
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Prior to sculpting the Pieta, Michelangelo was relatively unknown to the world as an artist. He was only in his early twenties when he was commissioned in 1498 to do a life-size sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding her son in her arms. It would be the first of four that he would create and the only one he completely finished. It was to be unveiled in St. Peter's Basilica for the Jubilee of 1500.
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In 1501, again through the agency of Jacopo Galli, Michelangelo was commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini to carve fifteen statuettes for the Piccolomini altar in Siena (left incomplete by the sculptor Andrea Bregno). Even though the commission was from an extremely important patron (a cardinal and the future Pope Pius III), it proved to be singularly unsuited to the artist's temperament. Reluctant--to complete, like some journeyman, another artist's unfinished work, Michelangelo carved only four of the statuettes and then avoided fulfilling the remainder of his obligation, even to the point of legal difficulties. Michelangelo readily set the Piccolomini carvings aside when he received the unusual opportunity to carve a David.
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