Quotes About Michelangelo

so often with Michelangelo, the strangeness is inseparable from the power of the work.

St Peter's – as Michelangelo re-imagined it – was the prototypical baroque church. Elderly, grief-stricken, constipated, Michelangelo made himself a great master of architecture: an art that, of course, was not even his profession.

Ambivalence and contradiction energize nearly every figure Michaelangelo carved, from the adolescent Madonna of the Stairs onward...But the four allegories atop the sarcophagi raise them to a symphonic crescendo. Each is a battleground of conflicting emotions and motives, in which will and paralysis battle for supremacy.

There is so much about the history of the Sistine that seems predestined. According to the more reliable sources, work began on renovating the chapel in 1475. In the very same year, in the Tuscan town of Caprese, Michelangelo Buonarroti was born.

He hauled in Michelangelo, commanding the aged maestro to make the naked figures in The Last Judgment "suitable" for the papal chapel. Michelangelo hotly replied: "Let His Holiness make the world a more suitable place, and then the painting will follow suit." That was the last time Buonarroti had anything to do with Carafa.

If an artist of the caliber of Leonardo or Michelangelo was paid a hefty commission for a new private piece of art, that artwork had to be a constant delight and stimulus for the rest of the patron's life, and then usually go on to become a family heirloom. If an artwork was commissioned by the government, it had to serve as a permanent expression of that society's ethos and values.

Michelangelo proposed to the pope that he make a large copy of the Pantheon dome on top of the new St. Peter's. The horrified pontiff replied that Hadrian's dome was pagan—the Vatican cathedral had to have a Christian-looking dome, like the one built in Florence a century before by Brunelleschi.

The ambitious pope had already discussed the Sistine ceiling with Michelangelo in 1506, probably while they were together in Bologna. No doubt Julius, an art lover, had heard of the huge success of the twin cartoons for the city hall frescoes in Florence. It is very likely that his summons to Michelangelo was also a way for the jealous Roman pontiff to sabotage the Florentine fresco project. We do know that Michelangelo never went back to that job.

Michelangelo then summarily fired his Roman staff of assistants. He next sent for five longtime friends, all artists with experience in fresco work, to come in from Florence for the duration of the project. Some would later on be replaced, but Buonarroti hired only Florentine helpers with tightly closed lips, so that none of the Roman spies could find out what he was really putting up on the Sistine ceiling.

Our first clue, included in each of the Sistine portraits of the sibyls and prophets—save one—is a scroll or a book, symbolizing literacy. Through his use of books and writing, Michelangelo is showing us that he believes these seers were the intellectuals of their respective times and places.

expensive paint jobs in history. Michelangelo began at the top of the wall and slowly worked his way down for more than seven years, painting exclusively by himself, with only one or two assistants. He was trudging up and down ladders while he was in his sixties, an age at which most people in the sixteenth century were either retired or buried.

With his genius, Michelangelo built many bridges of the spirit.

Michelangelo knew that for the Church to fulfill the will of God, it had to become a paradigm of true brotherhood. There had to be a bridge between rich and poor, between privileged and downtrodden, between those who ostensibly spoke for God and those who desperately needed divine assistance.

Almost exactly five hundred years ago, a tormented soul named Michelangelo built a very narrow bridge in the middle of the air in the middle of a chapel in the middle of Rome. This resulted in a masterwork that would change the world of art forever.

Their love, however, was the epitome of what we today would label "platonic." They loved each other's minds. Michelangelo was thrilled to find an intellectual peer and fellow spiritual traveler in Vittoria. Just as he had thrown himself so passionately into new ideas and movements in the past, he now became heart and soul one of the Spirituali.

In The Last Judgment, just as Mary is turning away from the severe judgment of Jesus, there is a deeper meaning: Michelangelo is symbolically turning away from the Church as well.

Historians are fairly certain that Buonarroti spent much time in the Jewish parts of Rome, using the authentic features of real Jews for his images. We can see the proof of that here. Except

There's a series of sculptures there by Michelangelo that you should see. They are called The Captives. Out of a great formless mass of stone, the figures of slaves emerge: heads, shoulders, torsos, straining toward freedom but still held fast in the stone. There are souls like that, Reyes. There are souls that try to carve themselves from their own formlessness.

The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That's called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor.

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo