MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI (in his own hand MICHELAGNIOLO). - Sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, born at Caprese (now Caprese-Michelangelo) in Tuscany, in the valley of the Tiber, on 6 March 1475, to Ludovico di Leonardo di Buonarroto Simoni, podestà of that borough and of Chiusi, and Francesca di ser Miniato del Sera and di Bonda Rucellai, both from Florence. The claim, which he himself believed, of descent of the Buonarroti Simoni (an ancient Florentine family) from the counts of Canossa is unfounded.
Taken to Florence a few days after his birth, he was placed as a boy in the grammar school of the humanist Francesco Galeota da Urbino, called il Greco, but without great profit, so that his father, yielding to his clear vocation, entrusted him on 1 April 1488 to Domenico and David del Ghirlandaio to learn the art of painting. No certain work remains from this period, but sources recall various drawings, among them a Temptation of St Anthony (lost), a coloured copy of a copper engraving by Schongauer. Frequenting, on the advice of Granacci, his fellow pupil, the Medici gardens of S. Marco filled with ancient statues and reliefs, and where Bertoldo, a pupil of Donatello, taught sculpture, Michelangelo discovered his true path and around 1489 left Ghirlandaio’s workshop. A Head of an Old Faun (lost), which he freely reworked from a classical fragment, attracted the attention of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who, coming to an agreement with his father, took him into his household, educating him with his own sons in an environment of refined humanistic culture dominated by Poliziano (1490–94). The latter’s Neoplatonism and, later, the fiery sermons of Savonarola exerted a profound influence on Michelangelo’s spirit, echoes of which are heard in his poetry.
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI — Portrait in pen by an unknown artist.
Rome, Gab. Naz. del Disegno.
(photo: Anderson)
Michelangelo Buonarroti - David (detail) - Florence, Gallery of Ancient and Modern Art.
Returning to Florence in 1495, now dominated by Savonarola, he modelled a St John the Baptist (now lost) and a Sleeping Cupid (now lost), which he sold as an antique to Cardinal Raffaele Riario. When the deception was discovered, the cardinal nevertheless admired the artist and summoned him to Rome, where he arrived on 25 June 1496.
By a private deed of 5 June 1501, dated from Rome, Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini (the future Pope Pius III) entrusted him with the execution of fifteen statuettes of saints for the niches of the altar of Andrea Bregno (the Piccolomini altar) in the cathedral of Siena. Returning to his native city in the summer of that year, Michelangelo carved only four of them, namely SS. Peter, Paul, Gregory and Pius (Siena, Duomo), working on them roughly from June 1501 to the autumn of 1504. F. Kriegbaum (1942) has rightly vindicated the interest of these minor works, which scholars have almost always neglected. Obtaining from the consuls of the Wool Guild and the Operai of S. Maria del Fiore (contract of 16 Aug. 1501) a large block of marble that had been lying abandoned and poorly blocked out in the courtyard of the Opera, Michelangelo carved from it, “for the insignia of the palace” (Vasari), a David (Florence, Accademia) nude with a sling, five and a half metres high, and therefore called by the Florentines the “Giant.” Begun on 13 Sept. 1501, the work was completed in January 1504, and the statue, on the advice of a committee (which included Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Perugino), was placed on 8 June 1504 on the platform in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, where until then stood Donatello’s Judith (it was replaced by a copy in 1873). In the David the heroic conception of the nude is manifested for the first time in monumental form, a conception that would triumph on the Sistine ceiling and has its roots in Roman statuary (rightly does Vasari recall, in connection with this work, the Dioscuri of the Quirinal, the Tiber and the Nile of the Belvedere). Another David (now lost), in bronze, with the head of Goliath under its foot (a pen drawing of it survives in the Louvre), was commissioned from him by the Signoria (contract of 12 Aug. 1502) to be presented to Marshal Pierre de Rohan. Completed in September 1508 and finished by Benedetto da Rovezzano, it was sent to France to Florimond Robertet (Rohan having meanwhile fallen into disgrace) and disappeared there in the 17th century. Of the Twelve Apostles that he had undertaken to carve for the cathedral of Florence (contract of 24 Apr. 1503), he only roughed out St Matthew (Florence, Accademia), a Herculean body emerging from the rock, which marks a notable advance over the marble David and inaugurates the phase of his full maturity. Michelangelo liked to work the stone directly, without the help of stonemasons, so that his “unfinished” statues (and there are many) never appear incomplete: in them the aesthetic vision is always suggested in its entirety, with a mysterious and almost musical expressive power. From October 1504 to August of the following year he drew the cartoon for the fresco of the Battle of Cascina (now lost), intended to adorn one of the long walls of the Sala dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio, in competition with Leonardo da Vinci, who on the opposite wall had already begun to paint the Battle of Anghiari. These two celebrated cartoons were, for the artistic generation of the early cinquecento, what Masaccio’s chapel at the Carmine had been for the previous generation: a “studio of craftsmen” (Vasari) and a school for masters, among them the young Raphael. Unfortunately the paintings were never executed, and those sheets were destroyed during the civic disturbances of 1512, so that today only a faint reflection of them survives in a few original sketches or in contemporary copies and prints of mediocre value. While Leonardo had depicted in his smoky chiaroscuro a mêlée of knights around a standard, Michelangelo’s design showed Florentine soldiers surprised by an enemy attack while bathing in the Arno (an episode from the war against Pisa in 1504). It was a pretext for extolling the nude in a rich and dynamic composition, and the fresco would doubtless have been very similar, in the precise and marked contour of the forms, the plastic clarity of the modelling and the clear sobriety of colour, to that of the Flood, painted a few years later on the Sistine ceiling. To the same Florentine sojourn belong also a group of important works of uncertain date, which are listed below.
The Madonna of Bruges (Bruges, Notre-Dame), a marble sold by Michelangelo in 1506 to the Mouscron family and sent to Flanders, depicts the Virgin in a pensive, almost prophetic mood, seated in an hieratic pose (the statue is composed for frontal viewing, like the altarpieces of the Dugento). This is dramatically contrasted with the unaware Child standing between her knees. Although the forms here are more restrained, particularly in the drapery and the modelling of the putto (similar to that in the Doni Tondo), the stylistic and technical affinity with the Pietà of St Peter’s is so evident as to make acceptable the hypothesis that the group still belongs to the Roman period. Two marble bas-reliefs of circular shape, both unfinished, representing the Virgin with the Child and known as the Taddei Madonna (London, Royal Academy) and the Pitti Madonna (Florence, Bargello), seem to have been executed after 1505, especially the latter, not far removed from the manner of the Sistine ceiling. Of that same year, most probably, is the only panel by Michelangelo still preserved, namely the Doni Holy Family (Florence, Uffizi), a composition of marvellous and novel balance in the tondo format. The absolute completeness of the design (as conceived by Renaissance aesthetics) is here clothed in a vivid chromatic liveliness, enlivened by daring colouristic effects unique in his art. Slightly earlier seem to be two unfinished paintings: the Virgin with Angels (London, National Gallery) and the Entombment of Christ (ibid.), both still partly tied to the stylistic modes of the late Quattrocento and not universally accepted as his works.
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI - Madonna called the “Madonna of the Stairs.” Florence, Casa Buonarroti.
On 11 November 1506 the Pope, at war with the Bentivoglio, entered Bologna, and the Signoria, fearing his proximity, ordered Michelangelo to visit him, furnished with a safe-conduct, to make peace with him, which took place towards the end of the month during a stormy audience. After pardoning his flight, the Pope commissioned from him a bronze statue of Julius II (now lost), about three times life-size, seated on a throne, wearing the papal tiara, his right hand raised in blessing and the sacred keys in the other. Lacking experience with bronze, Michelangelo had it cast, not without difficulty, by Maestro Bernardino d’Antonio del Ponte, and on 21 February 1508 it was solemnly erected in a marble tabernacle on the façade of S. Petronio as a sign of dominion. It remained there only briefly, for the Bentivoglio, having retaken the city, caused it to be thrown down in the piazza and brutally destroyed by the mob on 30 December 1511, leaving no more than a few summary descriptions and no surviving drawings or prints.
Michelangelo had barely returned to Florence at the beginning of March 1508, intending to complete the Apostles for the Duomo, when Julius II summoned him to Rome and, reviving a project he had cherished since 1506, ordered him to fresco the Vault of the Sistine Chapel (Vatican).
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI - Drawing. Study for the head of Adam in the Sistine Chapel - London, British Museum.
Sculpture, M. attempted to avoid the new commission, alleging that he was not a painter, but later he had to yield to the Pope’s insistence and, moreover, replaced the initial modest design (the twelve Apostles seated on thrones along the pendentives) with a vast cycle representing the history of Genesis, from the first moment until the Flood and the re‑beginning of life on earth in the family of Noah. The choice of subject clearly reveals the desire to link up with the two series of 15th‑century paintings on the side walls, which depict episodes from the lives of Moses and Christ: to the drama of original sin is added, in fact, the promise of Redemption, preserved for centuries by Israel and fulfilled in the Messiah. On 10 May 1508 M. began work on the Ceiling (according to an autograph “memoir”), assisted by a group of six painters specially summoned from Florence, less perhaps to help him than to show him how fresco was painted, an art with which he was little or not at all familiar up to that time. Indeed, after finishing the Flood, which he had begun, and where (according to the findings of Biagetti during the most recent restorations) traces of this collaboration can still be seen, he sent almost all of them away, retaining only a few to assist with minor tasks (painted frames, etc.). On 14 August 1511 Julius II wanted the first half of the Ceiling uncovered, which had in fact been completed since the previous September, and on 31 October 1512 he had the rest of the scaffolding removed, inaugurating it the following day (All Saints’ Day). The biblical themes developed by M. are: the Separation of Light from Darkness, where the Spirit of God moving over chaos is barely hinted at with a minimum of pictorial material; the Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants, a powerful synthesis in which the figure of the Eternal appears twice, suggesting an act of material creation in time and space; the Separation of Land from Waters and the Creation of Fishes, an episode later than the following one but placed here to leave more space for it; the Creation of Man, whose limbs, already formed with ideal beauty, receive the spark of life from the finger of God brought close to his; the Creation of Woman, drawn forth in adherence from the side of the sleeping Adam; the Original Sin and Expulsion from Paradise, a diptych in which guilt and punishment seem to spring from the same trunk of the Tree of Good and Evil; the Sacrifice of Noah, who remained faithful to God in a corrupt world; the Universal Flood, which shows the painter’s initial inexperience in figures too small for the great height; and finally the Drunkenness of Noah, a poignant epilogue to the solemn cycle, where one sees evil escaped from the Flood with the few survivors. The figure of the first patriarch links the stories of Genesis with those 15th‑century scenes of the Life of Moses (below), making the entire painted decoration of the Sistine a unified complex. The individual scenes are distributed in five larger and four smaller rectangles alternating along the axis of the ceiling, and seem to appear through the gaps of the rich architectural framework, as if they were celestial visions. Yet they are painted without illusionistic foreshortenings, as simple wall frescoes meant to be seen from the entrance door, arranged in an approximately chronological order that begins above the altar and then runs in reverse to the order in which they were executed. The drama is reflected in the joy and sorrow of the twenty youths, the Ignudi, paired two by two beside the smaller rectangles; it echoes in the thought of the seven Prophets and five Sibyls seated on thrones in the pendentives, and lives on with the promise of Redemption in the obscure faith of the so‑called Ancestors of Christ (the medieval “Tree of Jesse”) camped on the spandrels and lunettes. In the lunettes are four episodes alluding to the Messiah: David and Goliath, Judith and Holofernes, the Punishment of Haman and the Bronze Serpent of Aaron.
The unveiling of the Sistine Ceiling marks perhaps the most memorable date. It is the apogee of the Tuscan Renaissance, which beheld in it the perfect fulfillment of its fundamental aesthetic principle: that of “design,” as it had developed from Giotto to Masaccio and Ghirlandaio. In those frescoes, a theme of the highest human interest was translated into images whose realism must have seemed to contemporaries idealized in the very sense suggested by the “true,” in accordance with the example of classical art, and whose expressive power was entrusted above all to design, understood as the linear harmony of the contour and the sense of plastic relief given by chiaroscuro and enlivened by colour in a subordinate role. The famous saying of M., that sculpture is the “lantern of painting” (M.’s letter to B. Varchi of 1549), finds a marvellous commentary in the Sistine Ceiling, where he has in part transferred, unable to express them in marble, certain motifs akin to those imagined for the tomb of Pope della Rovere. And yet these frescoes, executed by a sculptor and almost by compulsion, are the most monumental pictorial work of the 16th century, of decisive importance for the further development of Italian art.
After the death of Julius II (21 February 1513), M. had returned to his beloved work of the Tomb, having made a new design for it (in the form of a chapel attached to a wall) and a second contract (6 May 1513). But on 5 December 1516 he had to go to Rome, from Carrara where he was obtaining the marbles for that monument, summoned by Leo X de’ Medici (elected 11 March 1513), who had chosen his Design for the façade of San Lorenzo in Florence (contract of 19 January 1518), presented in competition with other artists, among them Antonio da Sangallo and Raphael. M. began to execute his design, determined to make it “of architecture and sculpture the mirror of all Italy” (M.’s letter to D. Buoninsegni, 2 May 1517), but after more than three years spent in vain in the quarries of Pietrasanta, on 10 March 1520 he regained his freedom from the Pope, who wished “to make the aforesaid façade more quickly” (“memoir” of M. on that date), of which, apart from the foundations, only a wooden model remains (Florence, Casa Buonarroti). Between 1519 and 1520 he had also carved for Metello Vari (contract of 14 June 1514) a Risen Christ with the Cross (Rome, Santa Maria sopra Minerva), a marble partly spoiled by his assistant Pietro Urbani but later reworked by Federico Frizzi and finished by M. himself in 1521. This is perhaps, as it appears today, the least Michelangelesque of his figures.
A Leo X, who died on 1 December 1521, succeeded on 9 January 1522 the Dutchman Adrian VI Florensz, a pope of severe morals but little friend to men of letters and artists, who deserted Rome during his brief reign, which ended on 14 September 1523. At that time Michelangelo was engaged in Florence on the Sepultura of Julius II. Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, elected on 18 November 1523 under the name of Clement VII, confirmed to Michelangelo the commission given him since late 1520 (the works had begun in March 1521) to construct the interior of the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo (Florence) and to carve there the tombs of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, of Lorenzo the Magnificent, of Giuliano his brother, those of Leo X and his own (allotted in 1524 but not executed), wishing to make it the mausoleum of his House. Following the example of Brunelleschi, Michelangelo clad the white walls, which were to be partly frescoed, in a solid framework of cornices, arches and pilasters, divided into two superimposed orders and cut in dark stone, covering the rectangular space (extended by a small sacrarium) with a hemispherical coffered dome surmounted by a lantern of new form (completed in 1525). In this architecture the elegance of Florentine modules reveals unsuspected possibilities of vigour, re-expressed in a highly personal style, of which Vasari already noted the absolute novelty while respecting classical tradition. The original design (1520–1524) grouped the monuments at the centre of the chapel, but was soon abandoned in favour of a new project of three tombs set against the wall, each adorned with two recumbent figures on the chests and two Rivers lying on the ground, on which Michelangelo worked from 1524 to 1526. From this phase date the marbles of the Day (unfinished), the Night (famous also for the exchange of epigrams between G. Strozzi and Michelangelo), the Duke Lorenzo (an ideal figure, not a portrait, like that of Giuliano), the fragmentary clay model of a River (Florence, Accademia) and the Young Slave (Leningrad, Hermitage), perhaps a sketch for a caryatid. Begun much earlier was the Madonna and Child (unfinished), which recalls the youthful one of the Staircase, absorbed in the same sorrowful meditation. After 1531 were carved the Duke Giuliano, the Twilight (unfinished) and the Dawn. The Day and the Night were meant to lie above the flat lid of a sarcophagus at the feet of the Madonna, with two Rivers on the ground; their present and not altogether happy placement (the legs have no support), due to Tribolo, dates from after Michelangelo’s definitive departure for Rome in 1534. Of the various projects there remain today the monument of the restless Giuliano with the statues of the Day, in an attitude of defence, and of the Night, tormented by a nightmare (to the right of one facing the altar), that of Lorenzo (opposite), the sorrowful Pensieroso, with the resigned Twilight and the hopeless Dawn, as well as, facing the altar, the anguished Madonna and the statues of SS Cosmas and Damian (patrons of the Medici house), executed from the master’s design by Montorsoli and by Raffaello da Montelupo. In the finished parts these marbles verge on the art of the goldsmith, without sacrificing any of their essential sobriety and plastic power. The New Sacristy is the only monumental complex of Michelangelo’s that matured somewhat beyond the pale reflection of the initial idea. Its statues and its architecture, animated by a single passion, display the same lucid completeness as the frescoes of the Sistine ceiling, and in this most carefully wrought language they express the almost despairing vision with which, even then, Michelangelo regarded all human things.
Of similar style (and Vasari rightly notes its “resolved grace”) is the reading room of the Medicean Library (now the Laurentian Library), built next to San Lorenzo and commissioned to Michelangelo by Clement VII in 1524, together with the wooden dais and benches. He oversaw the works from about 1526 until 1534, when they ceased owing to the Pope’s death, and even in 1558 he sent Ammannati the design for the capricious staircase of the atrium, completed only in our own day.
(courtesy of Labor. Rest. Mus. Val.) MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI – The prophet Zechariah (white lines mark the boundaries of the working zones) – Sistine Chapel.
On learning of the Sack of Rome, the Florentines once more expelled the Medici (17 May 1527) and restored the Republic. When the armies of Clement VII and the Emperor, reconciled, moved against the city, Michelangelo was named one of the Nine of the Militia (10 January 1529) and general superintendent of the fortifications (6 April 1529). In that capacity he took an active part in the defence, carrying out military missions to Pisa, Livorno and Ferrara, and fortifying the Hill of San Miniato. Warned during the siege of the imminent treachery of Malatesta Baglioni, he fled to Ferrara (21 September 1529) and thence to Venice, so that he was banished from the Republic (22 September 1529). Soon afterwards, however, he returned home and, after his sentence was commuted (23 November 1529), resumed his duties. After the fall of Florence (2 August 1530), Michelangelo, pardoned by the Pope, devoted himself entirely to the enterprises of the Sacristy and the Laurentian Library. Also from this period are the Sacrarium for the relics above the main door of San Lorenzo (1531), a Leda painted on panel for Alfonso d’Este but later given to Antonio Mini and destroyed in France, the cartoon for a Venus kissed by Cupid, coloured by Pontormo (Florence, Uffizi), and an unfinished marble Apollo (Florence, Bargello) for Baccio Valori.
From 1532 to 1534 Michelangelo divided his activity between Florence and Rome, where he had resumed work on the Sepultura of Julius II, which he hoped to bring to completion. On 23 September 1534, however, he moved permanently to Rome. Within two days Clement VII died, and his successor Paul III Farnese (elected 13 October 1534) appointed him painter, sculptor and architect of the Sacred Palaces (brief of 1 September 1535), imposing on him, despite his resistance, the execution, at the age of sixty, of the immense fresco of the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel (Vatican). The cartoon (now lost) of this work, seen by the new Pope during a visit to Michelangelo’s studio, had been drawn at the request (1533) of Pope Clement, who had revived this unusual theme in Renaissance art and decided to have it painted not on the main door of the Chapel, its traditional
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI — A damned soul. Detail from The Last Judgment — Rome, Sistine Chapel.
This fresco, painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, was commissioned by Pope Paul III in 1533, replacing the traditional placement on the main door, perhaps in memory of the Sack of Rome in May 1527, which many saw as divine judgment on the excesses of the Renaissance. For Paul III, however, the psalm of the unfortunate Medici pope became the grand manifesto of the Catholic Reformation, which he tenaciously pursued and later enacted at the Council of Trent. This interpretation is supported by numerous details in the fresco that allude to pre-Tridentine theological controversies, particularly those surrounding Grace and works. These debates deeply interested Michelangelo, especially after his contact around 1536 with Vittoria Colonna, through whom he became acquainted with a circle of friends (Contarini, Pole, Morone, Lattanzio Tolomei, and others), the evangelism (v.), whose theories on Grace were inspired by an extreme Augustinianism.
Preliminary work began in April 1535, and the execution of the fresco lasted from the summer of 1536 to the autumn of 1541. Paul III unveiled the painting on October 31, 1541, to the "stupor and wonder" (Vasari) of contemporaries, who were stunned by Michelangelo’s new manner and the "terribility" (as they called it) of a work that seemed truly the Dies Irae of a dying Renaissance. In its essential iconographic elements and its arrangement in overlapping zones, the composition, though seemingly chaotic, does not stray far from the usual medieval Last Judgment schema. The two lunettes at the top show angels bearing the instruments of the Passion. In the upper zone, the blessed (men on the right, women on the left) gaze in terror at the condemning gesture of Christ the Judge (at the center), around whom stand Sts. Peter, Andrew, Lawrence, and Bartholomew (in whose flayed skin a self-portrait of Michelangelo appears), with the Virgin and the Baptist (the Byzantine deesis), a figure often mistakenly identified as Adam.
In the middle section are the ascending resurrected (on the left), angels (at the center) with trumpets and the books of Life and Death (the former small, the latter enormous), and the ruin of the damned vainly rebelling against the celestial host (on the right). In the lower zone is the resurrection of the dead, contested between angels and demons (on the left), a cavern filled with devils (at the center), and Charon’s boat dumping its cargo at the threshold of Hell, where Minos (a portrait of Biagio Martinelli da Cesena, Paul III’s master of ceremonies and an incautious critic of the Last Judgment) receives the sinners (on the right). Two episodes are drawn from the Divine Comedy (others, noted by Steinmann, remain uncertain), while the influence of Holy Scripture (particularly studied by Thode) operates indirectly through iconographic tradition. The Dies Irae is manifested in many details, such as the terror of the just (dum vix iustus sit securus) and the pensive skull among the risen (Mors stupebit). Classical reminiscences are evident in the trumpet-bearing angels, resembling Aeolus, but especially in Christ, whose limbs are those of a Hercules and whose face, with strange syncretism, recalls the Apollo Belvedere. Michelangelo, seeking to represent the body of the risen Son of God, here attempts—like a man of his time—to Christianize the ancient symbols of strength and beauty, though he was unjustly accused of paganizing a Christian ideal.
Other elements of the fresco relate to pre-Tridentine religious controversies, such as the Virgin enclosed, almost as a co-redemptrix, within the same halo as the Redeemer, the value of good works symbolized in the martyrs presenting the instruments of their torment to the Judge, the prominence given to the gigantic figure of St. Peter with his enormous keys, and finally the efficacy of Marian devotion shown in the two resurrected souls drawn to heaven by an angel clinging to a rosary.
Thus, after evoking the beginning of the universe on the ceiling, Michelangelo depicts its end on the vast wall. In the quarter-century separating the two works, his spirit and art had changed. In that deeply Christian soul, his affection for Vittoria Colonna, the nightmare of death, and the storms raging against the Church had exalted his religious sentiment to the point of mysticism. Hence arose his so-called "third manner," the result of both an ethical and aesthetic crisis, which first manifests itself in the Last Judgment. Faced with the urgency of expressing the hopes and anguish of his tormented faith, the interest in the "beautiful," as conceived by his century, gave way: "Make me hate whatever the world holds dear — he prayed — and all the beauty it reveres and worships" (C. Frey [V. BIBLICA.], no. CL). In the Last Judgment, he treated proportion and perspective, the two fundamental aesthetic dogmas of the Renaissance, with a freedom inconceivable in the time of the ceiling and incomprehensible to his contemporaries, no less than other audacities of the work (such as the nudity of the figures, wingless angels, and the beardless Christ), which Gilio da Fabriano (1565) criticized in his well-known Dialogi.
From the same period is the unfinished but wonderfully sketched bust of Brutus (Florence, Bargello), carved after 1539 at the request of Donato Giannotti for Cardinal Ridolfi, alluding to Lorenzino de’ Medici, the assassin of the despotic Duke Alessandro (1537). The manly effigy of the tyrannicide, perhaps inspired by an ancient bust of Caracalla, despite its incompleteness (and perhaps precisely because of it), proclaims Michelangelo’s love for his country’s freedom with a vehemence all the more powerful in artistic expression for being repressed in life. Also from these years is the so-called Palestrina Pietà (Florence, Accademia), another unfinished colossal marble group, unmentioned in sources and not universally accepted as his work. It was attributed to Michelangelo in L. Cecconi’s Storia di Palestrina (Ascoli 1756), later forgotten, rediscovered in 1875 by P. Gori, and finally published in 1907 by A. Grenier. Mariani rightly sees in it the style of the Last Judgment transposed into sculpture.
In October 1541, even before the Sistine wall was unveiled, Paul III had already commissioned Michelangelo to fresco the Pauline Chapel (Vatican) with The Conversion of Saul and The Martyrdom of St. Peter (a theme perhaps substituted for an original Delivery of the Keys). The work, delayed by two illnesses of Michelangelo and clouded by the death of Vittoria Colonna (February 25, 1547), lasted from late 1542 to about mid-1545 for the first painting, and from August of that year to around March 1550 for the second. Here the "third manner," already hinted at in the Last Judgment, reigns supreme, and the incomprehension of contemporaries and later generations toward these late works has been absolute. Michelangelo himself may have been struck by the profound change in his art; certainly, he never again took up the brush during his remaining years, devoting himself instead to the abstract and non-human beauty of architecture, as if seeking peace there, though even in that medium he infused the reflection of his spiritual struggles.
After the death of Antonio da Sangallo, Michelangelo succeeded him as architect of St Peter’s Basilica (Paul III’s brief of 1 January 1547, dispatched 11 October 1549), working there “for the love of God and without any reward” (Vasari). He reverted to Bramante’s Greek-cross plan and simplified it further, making the façade an atrium fronting a single order of colossal Corinthian pilasters that would support the dome. At his death the drum of the dome had been reached; the architects G. Della Porta and D. Fontana, charged with completing the work, diverged slightly from the Modello liguon (Vatican City, St Peter’s) by giving the external shell a less hemispherical profile for structural reasons and by refining its ribs.
Other architectural works from this period include: the funerary monument of Cecchino dei Bracci (Rome, S. Maria in Aracoeli), built in 1545, which also contains a bust of the deceased, probably executed from a model by Michelangelo himself; various parts, and in particular the cornice, of Palazzo Farnese (Rome), completed the following year; the reordering of the Piazza del Campidoglio with the new Palazzo dei Conservatori and Palazzo Senatorio, executed after his designs but not without alterations to the original scheme—especially in the central windows—after his death (Michelangelo had been granted Roman citizenship on 17 December 1537); the Porta Pia (Rome, c. 1561), and other buildings such as the Vigna di Giulio III (Rome) or the destroyed Ponte di S. Trinità (Florence), to which he contributed drawings or advice.
These were his public works in those years, but for himself, almost secretly (as Vasari attests), he carved for his own tomb between about 1550 and 1553 the Pietà of the Duomo (Florence, S. Maria del Fiore), with his self-portrait in the guise of Nicodemus; and in the last days of his life he was still chiselling at the eerie Rondanini Pietà (Rome, house of the Counts Sanseverino), both left unfinished. In this final work, on the threshold of his ninetieth year, Michelangelo sought once more to transform his style entirely, reducing the titanic figures of an earlier, likewise unfinished group (a detached arm survives beside the Christ) to spectral bodies, almost Rembrandtesque in aspect, pared down to the bare minimum needed to render the spirit palpable. His predilection for the theme of the Pietà, sign of his intense faith, is echoed in the invocation to the embrace of the Crucified that closes one of his sonnets and proclaims the great renunciation: “Né pinger, né scolpir fié più che quieti / l’anima, volta a quell’amor divino / ch’aperse a prender noi ’n croce le braccia” (C. Frey [see bibliography], no. CXLVII).
Michelangelo died in Rome, in his house in Macel de’ Corvi (now destroyed), on 18 February 1564, and was provisionally buried in SS. Apostoli. His remains were later secretly exhumed, transferred to Florence and laid to rest with solemn obsequies in the monument designed by Vasari in S. Croce. — See plates LIX–LX.
Deoclecio Redig de Campos