Michelangelo Buonarroti, the greatest of the Italian Renaissance artists

Michelangelo Buonarroti, the greatest of the Italian Renaissance artists, was born on March 6, 1475, in the small village of Caprese (Today, Caprese is known as Caprese Michelangelo or Tuscany, Italy). Michelangelo grew up in Florence, Italy. His Father was a government administrator and his Mother died when he was only six years old. After the death of his mother Michelangelo lived with a stone cutter and his family in the town of Settignano, where his father owned a marble quarry and small farm.

Along with living with a stone cutter (where he learned to handle marble), Michelangelo's influences included da Vinci and Dominico Ghirlandaio. Michelangelo showed no interest in school, he preferred to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of painters. His artistic talents were noticed at a very early age. At the age of thirteen, Michelangelo was apprenticed to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. At age fourteen Michelangelo’s father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay Michelangelo as an artist, which was unusual at the time.

Demonstrating obvious talent, he was taken under the wing of Lorenzo de' Medici, the ruler of the Florentine republic and a great patron of the arts. For two years beginning in 1490, he lived in the Medici palace and attended the Humanist academy, where he was a student of the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni and studied the Medici art collection, which included ancient Roman statuary. At the academy, both Michelangelo’s outlook and his art was influenced by many of the most prominent philosophers and writers of the day.

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At this time Michelangelo sculpted the Madonna of the Steps (1490-1492) and Battle of the Centaurs (1491-1492). Lorenzo de Medici, the man who gave Michelangelo the tools and schooling to perfect his artistry, passed away in 1492. Michelangelo decided that it was time to return home to his family, but he continued studying on his own. Although the practice was forbidden at the time by the church, Michelangelo got special permission to study anatomy of the dead at a hospital in the church of Santo Spirito.

He used his new knowledge of the human body to create some of his most famous works, including the famous statue of David (1501-1504), the sculptures in the Church of San Pietro, and the Creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, which there is a hypotheses that part of it is shaped like the human brain. Michelangelo’s love for sculpture continued to grow, and so did the attention of the world to his work. His demand as an artist grew, and he began creating some of the most famous works of his career.

And then there is his architecture, where Michelangelo reordered ancient forms in an entirely new and dramatic ways. Michelangelo was principally a sculptor and always claimed that architecture was not his profession, but, with a sculptor's vision, he saw buildings as dynamic organisms - metaphors of the human body and he designed some of the most impressive architecture in all history. Among his best-known buildings are the Medici Chapel and the Laurentian Library in Florence and he finished the architectural work on St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Michelangelo renewed architectures potential for the next generation of architects, freeing them from the need to slavishly imitate models from the past and allowing them to arrive at their own forms of expression. Michelangelo, though best known for his sculpture, was also a poet. He composed over 300 pieces of poetry during his life time including the poem about the hardships of painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In his poems he discusses categories pertaining to love, death, evil and good, and beauty. His writing is similar to his art in that every word is carved into the realities of life.

Michelangelo's art is his love of male beauty, which attracted him both by the nature of natural beauty and emotionally. Such feelings caused him great anguish, and he expressed the struggle between reality and desire for the male body in his sculpture and his poetry. The sculptor loved many youths, many of whom posed for him. His greatest love was Tommaso dei Cavalieri, who was 16 years old when Michelangelo met him in 1532, at the age of 57. Cavalieri was open to the older man's affection and Michelangelo dedicated many poems to him.

Some say Michelangelo’s relationship with Cavalieri was only a deep friendship and not sexual. Even if Michelangelo had homo-erotic impulses, there is no evidence he acted on them. Cavalieri was not the only inspiration for Michelangelo’s poetry. Later in life he fell in love with Vittoria Colonna. She was a widow and friend to Michelangelo in his later maturity. Between Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna a deep friendship developed, one might almost say an absolutely pure love, inspired by poetry and faith, out of which were to emerge some of Michelangelo's finest lyric poems, overflowing with admiration and devotion.

She died at the age of 56 and Michelangelo was deeply affected by her death writing many commemorative pieces in her honor. Michelangelo worked until his death in 1564 at the age of 88. He caught a fever and a few days later he passed away. Michelangelo's revolutionizing artistic techniques altered the artist's method for centuries, and still effect how art is made today. His view on the world and its leaders changed the way artists portray their subjects and how bold they allowed their artwork to be. Michelangelo will always be known as one of the most influential artists the world has ever known. ttp://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Michelangelo www. sparknotes. com Several hypotheses have been put forward about the meaning of The Creation of Adam's highly original composition, many of them taking Michelangelo's well-documented expertise in human anatomy as their starting point. In 1990, an Anderson, Indiana physician named Frank Lynn Meshberger, M. D. noted in the medical publication the Journal of the American Medical Association that the background figures and shapes portrayed behind the figure of God appeared to be an anatomically accurate picture of the human brain. 5] Dr. Meshberger's interpretation has been discussed by Dr. Mark Lee Appler. [6] On close examination, borders in the painting correlate with major sulci of the cerebrum in the inner and outer surface of the brain, the brain stem, the frontal lobe, the basilar artery, the pituitary gland and the optic chiasm. [5] Alternatively, it has been observed that the red cloth around God has the shape of a human uterus (one art historian has called it a "uterine mantle"[7]), and that the scarf hanging out, colored green, could be a newly cut umbilical cord. 8] "This is an interesting hypothesis that presents the Creation scene as an idealized representation of the physical birth of man. It explains the navel that appears on Adam, which is at first perplexing because he was created, not born of a woman. "[9] Michelangelo was both highly literate and plain-spoken. He felt passionate toward individuals, both female and male (Vitoria Colonna and Tommasco Cavalieri in particular. Platonic love suited Michelangelo because the demands of his profession came first. Vittoria, who was independent and highly intelligent, was inaccessible.

She was the woman who came closest to being his intellectual equal, and a person characterized by loftiness, nobility and virtue--all of which appealed to the poet. He turned to her for guidance and idealized her through the ecstasy of his religious mindset; Michelangelo was a deeply religious person who believed in prayer and all the accompanying Renaissance religious imagery characteristic of his era. She was a widow and friend to Michelangelo in his later maturity. She died at the age of 56 and Michelangelo was deeply affected by her death writing many commemorative pieces in her honor.

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