Michelangelo

     

 

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Michelangelo was born on the 6th March, 1475 in the small Tuscan village of Caprese to the podesta, Ludovico di Leonardo di Buonarroto Simoni and to Francesca di Neri di Miniato del Sera. The youth, left orphan by his mother at the age of six, was introduced into the Florentine artistic circle, a long way removed from the paternal activity, in 1488, by his friend Francesco Granacci, through whom he gained a period of apprenticeship in Domenico Ghirlandaio's studio. His uncommon qualities allowed him, immediately afterwards, to become part of the Medici circle in the garden at St. Mark's and to frequent, in the Medici Palace, the elite of the humanists chosen by Lorenzo the Magnificent.
Together with his first experiences in the field of ancient statuary, drawn up in the relief of the Battle between the Centaurs and the Lapiths, Michelangelo cultivated his poetic passion, encouraged by scholars and philosophers. The arrival of Charles VIII's army in 1494 forced him to escape from the city and take refuge in Bologna, where he completed some statues for the altar of St. Dominic's.
Only during his first stay in Roma (1496 - 1501) did he succeed in getting important commissions with the patronage of the rich banker, Jacopo Galli, the buyer of his Bacchus (Florence, Bargello Museum) and guarantor for the commission for the Vatican Pi eta requested by the ambassador to the king of France.
By now famous, in Florence, his impetuous and suspicious nature gained him his first disagreements with his more illustrious colleagues, including Leonardo, concerning his undertakings: the David (Florence, the Academy Galleries), symbol of civic virtue, and the Battle of Cascina, the great fresco project which he left unfinished in 1504. The Tondo Doni preceded the grandiose Roman commissions that the newly elected Julius 11 gave him from 1505 on. These were the years of the interminable project for the papal tomb that would torment him for 40 years and risk damaging the relations with the pontiff after the sudden running away of the artist to Florence. It was resolved through the intervention of the gonfalonier, Piero Soderini. Haughty and proud to the point of signing his youthfu I masterpiece, the Pieta, only to hear it attributed to someone else and disposed to confront the anger of the pontiff, impatient to see the Sistine chapel ceiling finished.
 
He was a solitary genius and rebel, loved, but also hated by his rivals, including Sangallo. After the important Florentine projects for the fac;;ade of St. Lorenzo's (unfinished), with the annexed New Sacristy, the MediciTombs and the prodigious architectonic intuition shown in the Laurentian Library, Michelangelo would be once again called to Roma to the interminable Vatican building site, even to start basic urban interventions but, above all, to finish the decoration of the Sistine Chapel.The religious anxiety can be seen in this work by the artist, by now elderly - already influenced by the preaching of Savanarola - who materialises in the sublime "unfinished" of the last Pietas. His spiritual association with Vittoria Colonna dates back to those years and, even before, the friendship with the noblemanTommaso de' Cavalieri to whom he gave his designs, acquired in 1587 by the Farnese family. Many of them would be destroyed by Michelangelo himself before dying on the 18th February, 1564, in his Roman house near Santa Maria di Loreto, demolished for the construction of the General Assurance Building (tablet on the wall). The body, on the wishes of his nephew, was interred in the church of the Holy Cross at Florence.
 
     
   
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