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Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (March 6, 1475 – February 18,
1564), commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance
painter, sculptor, architect and poet. Despite making few forays beyond
the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a
high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the
archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and fellow Florentine
Leonardo da Vinci.
Michelangelo's output in every field during his long life was
prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches and
reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the
best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works,
the Pietà and the David, were sculpted in his late twenties to early
thirties. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created
two of the most influential fresco paintings in the history of Western
art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgement on
the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Later in life he designed
the dome of St Peter's Basilica in the same city and revolutionised
classical architecture with his invention of the giant order of
pilasters.
Uniquely for a Renaissance artist, two biographies were published of
Michelangelo during his own lifetime. One of them, by Giorgio Vasari,
proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the
beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have
currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often
called Il Divino ("the divine one"), an appropriate sobriquet given his
intense spirituality. One of the qualities most admired by his
contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur,
and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's
impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in the next major
movement in Western art after the High Renaissance, Mannerism. |
