Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [27]
Michelangelo, “The Creation of Adam,” detail, 1508-12, Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome. A Zeus-like God transmits the spark of life to Adam. Michelangelo used the male nude to express every human aspiration and emotion.
Despite his disdain for painting, which he considered an inferior art, Michelangelo’s fresco was a culmination of figure painting, with the figures drawn not from the real world but from a world of his own creation. The nudes, which had never been painted on such a colossal scale, are simply presented, without background or ornament. As in his sculpture, the torsos are more expressive than the faces. His twisted nude forms have a relieflike quality, as if they were carved in colored stone.
Encompassing an entire wall of the Sistine Chapel is the “Last Judgment” fresco Michelangelo finished twenty-nine years after the ceiling. Its mood is strikingly gloomy. Michelangelo depicted Christ not as a merciful Redeemer but as an avenging Judge with such terrifying effect that Pope Paul III fell to his knees when he saw the fresco. “Lord, hold not my sins against me!” the pope cried. Here, too, Michelangelo showed his supreme ability to present human forms in motion, as nearly 400 contorted figures struggled, fought, and tumbled into hell.
Michelangelo, “The Last Judgment,” detail, 1541, Sistine Chapel, Rome. St. Bartholomew, a martyr who was flayed alive, holds up his skin with a grotesque self-portrait of Michelangelo.
Michelangelo, Campidoglio, 1538-64, Rome. Michelangelo broke Renaissance rules by designing this piazza with interlocking ovals and variations from right angles.
THE ARCHITECT. In his later years, Michelangelo devoted himself to architecture, supervising the reconstruction of Rome’s St. Peter’s Cathedral. Given his lifelong infatuation with the body, it’s no wonder Michelangelo believed “the limbs of architecture are derived from the limbs of man.” Just as arms and legs flank the trunk of the human form, architectural units, he believed, should be symmetrical, surrounding a central, vertical axis.
The best example of his innovative style was the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the first great Renaissance civic center. The hill had been the symbolic heart of ancient Rome, and the pope wanted to restore it to its ancient grandeur. Two existing buildings already abutted each other at an awkward 80° angle. Michelangelo made an asset of this liability by adding another building at the same angle to flank the central Palace of Senators. He then redesigned the facade of the lateral buildings so they would be identical and left the fourth side open, with a panoramic view toward the Vatican.
Unifying the whole was a statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (see p. 17) on a patterned oval pavement. Renaissance architects considered the oval “unstable” and avoided it, but for Michelangelo, measure and proportion were not determined by mathematical formulae but “kept in the eyes.”
RAPHAEL. Of the three major figures of the High Renaissance school (Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael), Raphael (pronounced rah fa yell; 1483-1520) would be voted Most Popular. While the other two were revered and their work admired, Raphael was adored. A contemporary of the three men, Vasari, who wrote the first art history, said Raphael was “so gentle and so charitable that even animals loved him.”
Raphael, “School of Athens,” 1510-1 Vatican, Rome. Raphael’s masterpiece embodies the High Renaissance in its balance, sculptural quality, architectural perspective, and fusion of pagan and Christian elements.
Raphael’s father, a mediocre painter, taught his precocious son the rudiments of painting. By the age of 17, Raphael was rated an independent master. Called to Rome by the pope at age 26 to decorate the Vatican rooms, Raphael completed the frescoes, aided by an army of fifty students,