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Michelangelo Buonarroti: Pope Julius Ii
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In 1546 Michelangelo was given the task of completing the design for Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. Pope Julius II first gave the commission to Michelangelo's rival, Donato Bramante, in 1506. Bramante envisioned a church based upon a Greek cross (a cross with all four arms of equal length) and surmounted by a great dome. When Bramante died in 1514, only the enormous supports for the dome were in place, but these determined the scale and other elements of the design. At least three other architects contributed to the design before Michelangelo took over, with the most recent one having added a long nave to the church. Michelangelo returned to Bramante's plan, but made it more compact, strengthening the supports and unifying the exterior with gigantic pairs of pilasters with Corinthian capitals.
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Michelangelo was summoned back to Rome in 1503 by the newly appointed Pope Julius II and was commissioned to build the Pope's tomb. However, under the patronage of Julius II, Michelangelo had to constantly stop work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks. The most famous of those were the monumental paintings on the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel which took four years (1508 - 1512) to complete. Due to those and later interruptions, Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years without ever finishing it.
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Michelangelo met Leonardo da Vinci in Florence in between the year 1501 and 1505. Together, they created the masterpiece of the large battle scenes for the walls of the city hall. From then on, Michelangelo only made large size projects. He began work on statues of marble for Pope Julius II’s Tomb.
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From 1508 until 1512 Michelangelo worked on his most famous project, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. He had always considered himself a sculptor and resisted painting the Sistine with characteristic vehemence: "I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint." Only the power of the Pope Julius II forced him into the reluctant achievement of the world's greatest single fresco. He covered the ceiling with paintings done on wet plaster, showing nine scenes from the Old Testament. Michelangelo later painted "The Last Judgment" on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel.
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Perhaps the greatest influence on western art in the last five centuries, Michelangelo was an Italian sculptor, architect, painter and poet in the period known as the High Renaissance. His great works were almost entirely in the service of the Catholic Church, and include a huge statue of the biblical hero David (over 14 feet tall) in Florence, sculpted between 1501 and 1504, and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome (commissioned by Pope Julius II), painted between 1508 and 1512. After 1519 Michelangelo was increasingly active in architecture; he designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, completed after his death. Along with contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, he is considered one of the great masters of European art.
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Michelangelo undertook the project for the tomb of Pope Julius II in 1505, and began to carve the Slaves in 1513, as part of a modified project. On the pope's death, the project changed once again, for financial reasons. Michelangelo donated the Slaves to Roberto Strozzi, who brought them to France.
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