Posted on 03/21/2006 8:28:22 PM PST by presidio9
Throughout his long life, Michelangelo Buonarroti was plagued by deadlines and a sense of lost freedom. He could never escape his employers. One pope thrashed him with a stick to try and speed up the Sistine Chapel. Another, refusing his bid for more time, sneered that he should learn to paint with his toes as well as his fingers.
Compared with Leonardo's abysmal catalogue of false starts, a massive body of work remains. But Michelangelo was haunted by projects unfinished or never begun - a vast equestrian monument, a statue bigger than David, the Laurentine Library, the Medici Chapel. To which one might mournfully add the works now lost, from colossal bronzes to the celebrated snowman that once thrilled Florence. But these vanished dreams leave traces, for what survives of so much loss is an extraordinary body of drawings.
To say that Michelangelo is the greatest draughtsman who ever lived is a meaningless commonplace. Born in 1475, and dead at nearly 90, he lived through an age of incredible performers on paper. But none of his contemporaries, not even Leonardo, can rival Michelangelo's mastery of the human body, specifically the male nude, nor the zeal and power of his line. In his drawings, every figure excels, every being aspires to greater beauty. His grasp of form and his conflation of the real with the ideal, conveyed in bare chalk and ink, are absolutely without parallel.
Anyone lucky enough to get to the British Museum can witness this fact in the first show of Michelangelo's drawings in more than three decades. Given that so few of his masterpieces are portable, this is about as close to a Michelangelo retrospective as we'll ever get. It gives the whole career,
(Excerpt) Read more at observer.guardian.co.uk ...
Amen
And yet we have counterfeiters that can duplicate these works so accurately, that they confound even the curators.
Any idea if this exhibition will be traveling to the US? I will never forgive myself if I don't get to it. This is truely a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
bump...for the same question
Incidently, the Met had a retrospective on just the sketches of Van Gogh this summer, and I can't tell you how much this changed the understanding of the man and his art. Michelangelo famously destroyed most of his sketches, but I can only imagine what those that remain would tell us. Obviously Van Gogh wasn't in the same universe as Michelangelo. No one was.
Drawing on the outstanding collections of the British Museum, the Ashmolean and the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, Michelangelo Drawings is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to follow the evolution of some of the world's most celebrated artworks.
The exhibition traces sixty years of Michelangelo's stormy life, from intimate studies made when he was in his early twenties to the visionary Crucifixion scenes carried out shortly before his death.
It reunites material not seen together since the dispersal of the artist's studio more than 400 years ago, offering a wholly different perspective on the defining genius of the Italian Renaissance
No mention that the exhibit will be touring. :(
If most of Leonardo's ideas ever came to fruition, I'd be inclined to agree with you, but they didn't. The man spent a lot of time doodling in notebooks, bot for every design of a flying machine that actually doesn't work there are plenty of outrageous ones that obviously don't which Leonardophiles tend to ignore. Also, I think the author was referring to Michelangelo's "genius" strictly in the artistic sense. Obviously Newton's "genius" surpasses Michelangelo's. Leonardo wasn't half the artist that Michelangelo was.
Indivdual taste is, of course, subjective, but it is a simple fact that no other artist left a comparable body of work.
A good metaphor comes from baseball: Everyone has their own personal allegiances and appreciations of the game, but if you don't understand that Babe Ruth was the greatest baseball player of all time, you are simply arguing from a postion of ignorance. There is simply no other artist in the same league as Michelangelo.
I'm not disagreeing here, but I have to say that Hedrik Goltzius was his equal. I wish more attention was directed to this engraver, draftsman and colorist.
Is the story about popes berating him, etc., true? It sounds like stuff the MSM would concoct to make the Church look bad.
Wow. Got chills scrolling down and looking at that drawing. Ethereal.
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