"I SAW THE ANGEL IN THE MARBLE AND CARVED UNTIL I SET HIM FREE."

Michelangelo Buonnaroti lived between 1475 and 1564 and was born in Urbino, Italy. He thought of himself mainly as a sculptor - sometimes signing his name as Michelangiolo schultore - but he was also a painter, poet, and architect. He was lucky enough to learn the art of fresco painting from Ghirlandaio. During his early years, he worked in Rome and Florence sculpting the famous David and Bacchus, working on tombs by the order of Julius II, and painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Near the end of his lifetime, he painted the Last Judgment and produced three sculptures - all Pietas. The last of the three, The Rondanini Pieta (1552-1564), was quite different from most sculptures of the time. It was rough and rather undefined, yet not dull in the least. It was left unfinished or in Italian, nonfinito . Some Mannerist artists felt it was left unfinished to provide an effect of spontaneity. Others believed Michelangelo thought a work such as the Rondanini could not be completed with human hands (just as some people feel God is the only perfect being and thus leave flaws in works of art, quilts, etc.). Unlike an artist such as Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo was highly respected in Italy and had a busy, successful career.

Grant me an old man's frenzy...
A mind Michael Angelo knew
That can pierce the clouds,
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake the dead in their shrouds.
-W.B. Yeats, 'An Acre of Grass' (1936-9)

I sucked in chisels and hammers with my nurse's milk.
-Michelangelo Buonarroti, quoted in Vasari, Lives of the Painters (1568)

As a baby, Michelangelo was 'put to nurse with a stone-cutter's wife.'

The impassioned fantasy, that, vague and
vast.
Made art an idol and a king to me,
Was an illusion, and but vanity
Were the desires that lured me...
-Michelangelo Buonarroti, 'To Giorgio Vasari' (1554)

The Homer of painting.
-Sir Joshua Reynolds, in The Idler, 1759

God! What a man! What beauty!
-Eugene Delacroix, Journal, 1824

You would attain to the divine perfection
And yet not turn your back upon the world.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Michael Angelo, I

All his statues are so constrained by agony that they seem to wish to break themselves. They all seem ready to succumb to the pressure of despair that fills them.
-Auguste Rodin, On Art and Artists (1911)

Without clearly expressing his sarcastic intent, he makes an angel out of an ordinary workshop apprentice and the patron saint of the city out of a tramp.
-Carl Justi, Michelangelo (1900)

Michael Angelo, the the famous painter, painting in the Pope's chapel the portraiture of hell and damned souls, made one of the damned souls so like a cardinal that was his enemy, as everybody at first sight knew it; whereupon the cardinal complained to Pope Clement, humbly praying it might be defaced. The Pope said to him, Why, you know very well I have power to deliver a soul out of purgatory, but not out of hell.
-Sir Francis Bacon, Apophthegms New and Old (1624)

 

David
1501-1504
Galleria dell'Accademia

The Creation of Man
1508-1512
Sistine Chapel, Vatican City

Dying Slave (unfinished), marble
approx. 1513
Musée du Louvre, Paris

Rondanini Pieta
1564
Civiche Raccolte d'Arte del Castello Sforzesco, Milan

Sybille de Cummes
Sistine Chapel, Vatican City

The Last Judgment
Sistine Chapel, Vatican City