LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Michelangelo Buonarroti: Sculptures
built 630 days ago
Once again, Michelangelo began in the marble quarries. Inspired by Roman antiquity, Michelangelo imagined an all-marble facade adorned with a dozen monolithic columns. With little previous training in architecture, he nonetheless set out to create the most magnificent and expensive building in Florence, "the mirror of architecture and sculpture of all Italy." He quarried marble blocks of a size and quantity unequalled in more than a thousand years, from Alpine quarries that even today are virtually inaccessible, with a transport system of sleds and oxen that had to be organized and staffed, with equipment that was made and borrowed and sometimes defective, in weather that was often uncooperative and roundly cursed, and with men who were hand picked but required training. He selected and inspected all his materials, arranged for rope, tackle, and boats, haggled with carters about fees, and made drawings for even the tiniest, seemingly most insignificant detail before turning the paper over to make calculations, count bushels of grain, draft a letter, or compose poetry. Michelangelo was not only a creative genius but a savvy businessman, equally at home dealing with the mundane or creating the sublime.
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[W]hen Michelangelo was 13 years old, told his father that he would continue his studies but in a different area. Wanting to be a painter, decided to become an apprentice of Domenico Ghiraldaio, Freancesco Galeota’s master and teacher. After about a year in fresco, Michelangelo started studying sculpture in the Medici gardens and a little afterwards, was invited to Lorenzo de’Medici, the Magnificent. There had been an opportunity to converse with the younger Medici, both became popes (Leo X and Clement VII). He ... became acquainted with humanists like Marsilo Ficino and the poet Angelo Poliziano, frequent visitors of the Medici court.
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After political events led to the expulsion of the powerful Medici family from Florence in 1494, Michelangelo traveled to Venice, Bologna, and finally to Rome. He produced his first large-scale sculpture in Rome, a larger-than-life-size figure of a drunken Bacchus (1496-1498, Museo Nazionale, Bargello, Florence), the Roman god of wine. This sensual, nude youth is one of his few works of pagan rather than Christian subject matter and was based on ancient Greek and Roman statuary.
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In 1520 Michelangelo was commissioned to execute a tomb chapel for two young Medici dukes. The Medici Chapel (1520-1534), an annex to S. Lorenzo, is the most nearly complete large sculptural project of Michelangelo's career. The two tombs, each with an image of the deceased and two allegorical figures, are placed against elaborately articulated walls; these six statues and a seventh on a third wall, the Madonna, are by Michelangelo's own hand. The two saints flanking the Madonna are by assistants from his clay sketches. Four river gods were planned but not executed.
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Michelangelo then went to Rome, where he was able to examine many newly unearthed classical statues and ruins. He soon produced his first large-scale sculpture, the over-life-size Bacchus (1496-98, Bargello, Florence). One of the few works of pagan rather than Christian subject matter made by the master, it rivaled ancient statuary, the highest mark of admiration in Renaissance Rome.
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Michelangelo produced three sculptures of the Madonna holding the dead Christ in her lap, called the Pieta. The first (1498-99) is at St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome. The second (ca.1550) is at the Museo Civico in Milan. Read more
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