The Renaissance: Michelangelo & The Sistine Chapel
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was an Italian painter, sculptor, architect, and poet who was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, Republic of Florence, Italy. He was and still is considered one of the best artists of all time, with the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel probably being the best known of his works today. Although Michelangelo had great success and unlike many others, gained fame and fortune, he started off as an apprentice to a painter before studying in the sculpture gardens of the powerful Medici family, then following his amazing, sensational and inspiring career as an artist.
Michelangelo did a lot during his lifetime, even more so for the renaissance and artists throughout history. Earlier on in his life he became an expert in portraying the human form, drawing from life and studying anatomy, by obtaining special permission from the Catholic Church to study human corpses to learn anatomy, providing a blend of physical realism and psychological insight to his work and society around him. This aided him in his work with sculpting, creating incredibly realistic sculptures which depicted finely chiseled veins, wrinkles, muscles, bones and nerves. Such skill was and is still unsurpassed in the 21st century. During this era, Florence was regarded as the leading centre of art, producing the best painters and sculptors in Europe, and the competition among those artists was getting intense. His influence had some effect, specifically on certain 17th-century masters of the Baroque, most probably showing the fullest reference to him and his work, but in ways that to exclude any literal similarity. Many artists took Michelangelo’s work and techniques into their own, artists such as the painter Peter Paul Rubens. His work may best show the usability of Michelangelo’s creations for a later great artist as well as Gian Lorenzo Bernini and many sculptures, paintings and buildings around the world.
Michelangelo has many pieces and artwork that are world famous, even to this day but one of them more that I decided to focus on is The Doni Tondo also known as The Holy Family. It is the only finished panel painting by the mature Michelangelo to survive. Still in it’s original, round frame, it’s now located in the Uffizi in Florence, Italy. The painting itself was probably commissioned by Agnolo Doni to commemorate his marriage to Maddalena Strozzi, the daughter of a powerful Tuscan family. The painting features the Christian Holy family (the child Jesus, The Virgin Mary, being the most prominent figure in the composition and taking up much of the center of the image. and Saint Joseph) along with John the Baptist in the foreground and contains five ambiguous nude male figures in the background. From an artistic point of view, this specific piece laid the foundations of the so-called Mannerism, the style of painting that preferred bizarre, unnatural poses and iridescent colors as opposed to the composed painting of the XV century, therefore making it a very important work of art because it is one of the few examples of Michelangelo’s painting, together with the magnificent frescoes in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel.
The Sistine Chapel, built in 1479, played an important role in Italian Renaissance art history,housing some of the most iconic images of the era and had great symbolic meaning in the Vatican, used for great ceremonies such as electing and inaugurating new popes. It already contained distinguished wall paintings, and in 1508, Pope Julius II hired Michelangelo to add works for the relatively unimportant ceiling, with the theme of the Twelve Apostles later on changing and elaborating into more than 300 figures on the ceiling of the sacred space, taking four years to create the masterpiece from 1508-1512.
As you can see, Michelangelo had and still has a huge influence on history and art work all around the world. His talents and masterpieces inspired many artists, artifacts, apprentices and studies. Many of his pieces lay in Italy, attracting millions of people year round. That period would have failed to be as revolutionary as it was if he was not apart of it, his impact on the renaissance influenced art and society for centuries afterwards and well into modern society today.
