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Michelangelo   Listen
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Michelangelo  n.  Michelangelo Buonarroti, renowned Italian painter, sculptor and architect; 1475-1564. Born Michelagnolo Buonarroti at Caprese, March 6, 1475: died at Rome, Feb. 18, 1564. A famous Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet. He came of an ancient but poor Florentine family. He was apprenticed to the painter Ghirlandajo April 1, 1488, and with other boys from the atelier began soon after to study the antique marbles collected by Lorenzo de' Medici in the garden of San Marco. Lorenzo discovered him there, and in 1489 took him into his palace, where he had every opportunity for improvement and study. The Centaur relief in the Casa Buonarroti was made at this time, at the suggestion of Angelo Poliziano. In 1491 he came under the influence of Savonarola, whom he always held in great reverence. In 1492 Lorenzo died, and Michelangelo's intimate relations with the Medici family terminated. In 1493 he made a large wooden crucifix for the prior of S. Spirito, and with the assistance of the prior began the profound study of anatomy in which he delighted. Before the expulsion of the Medici he fled to Bologna, where he was soon engaged upon the Arca di San Domenico begun by Niccolo Pisano in 1265, to which he added the well-known kneeling angel of Bologna. He was probably much influenced by the reliefs of Della Quercia about the door of San Petronio: two of these he afterward imitated in the Sistine chapel. In 1495 he returned to Florence, when he is supposed to have made the San Giovannino in the Berlin Museum. From 1496 to 1501 he lived in Rome. To this period are attributed the Bacchus of the Bargello and the Cupid of the South Kensington Museum. The most important work of this time is the Pietà di San Pietro (1408). In 1501 he returned to Florence, and Sept. 18 began the great David of the Signoria, made from a block of marble abandoned by Agostino di Duccio, which was placed in position May 18, 1504. The two roundels of the Madonna and Child in Burlington House and the Bargello were probably made then, and also the picture of the Holy Family in the Uffizi. In 1503 Piero Soderini, gonfaloniere, projected two frescos for the Sala Grande of the Palazzo Vecchio. The commission for one was given to Leonardo da Vinci, that for the other to Michelangelo in 1504. For it he prepared the great cartoon of the Battle of Cascina, an incident in the war with Pisa when, July 28, 1364, a band of 400 Florentines were attacked while bathing by Sir John Hawkwood's English troopers. This cartoon contained 288 square feet of surface, and was crowded with nude figures in every position. It had, probably, more influence upon the art of the Renaissance than any other single work. To about this time may be attributed the beginning of his poetic creations, of the multitude of which undoubtedly written a few only have come down to us. In Nov., 1505, he was called to Rome by Pope Julius II. to design his mausoleum, the history of which runs through the entire life of the master. Repeated designs and repeated attempts to carry them out were made, only to be frustrated by the successors of the great Pope. The matter finally ended in the reign of Paul III. by the placing in San Pietro in Vincoli of the statue of Moses surrounded by mediocre works finished by Raffaello da Montelupo and others. The Two Captives of the Louvre are part of the work as originally designed. In the spring of 1506 he assisted in the discovery of the Laocoon in the palace of Titus. His favorite antique was the Belvedere Torso, supposed to be a copy of the Hercules Epitrapezius of Lysippus. In April, 1506, probably as a result of the intrigues of Bramante, he was forced to abandon Rome for Florence. In the autumn he joined the Pope at Bologna, and made (1506-07) the bronze statue of Julius which stood over the door of San Petronio and was destroyed in 1511. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was begun early in 1508, and finished in Oct., 1512. Julius II. died Feb. 21, 1513, and was succeeded by Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, son of the great Lorenzo, as Leo X, Michelangelo was diverted from the tomb of Julius by Leo, and employed from 1517 to 1520 in an abortive attempt to build the façade of San Lorenzo in Florence, and in developing the quarries of Carrara and Seravezza. In 1520 he began, by order of Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, the sacristy of San Lorenzo and the tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici with the famous reclining figures on the sarcophagi, perhaps the most thoroughly characteristic of all his works. Leo X. was succeeded by Adrian VI. in 1521, and he in turn by Giulio de' Medici as Clement VII. in 1523. On April 6, 1529, Michelangelo was appointed "governor and procurator-general over the construction and fortification of the city walls" in Florence. On Sept. 21, 1529, occurred his unexplained flight to Venice. He returned Nov. 20 of the same year, and was engaged in the defense of the city until its capitulation, Aug. 12, 1530. Before the end of the year 1534 he left Florence, never to return. The statues of the sacristy, including the Madonna and Child, were arranged after his departure. Alessandro Farnese succeeded Clement VII. as Paul III., Oct., 1534. The Last Judgment was begun about Sept. 1, 1535, and finished before Christmas, 1541. Michelangelo's friendship for Vittoria Colonna began about 1538. (See Colonna, Vittoria.) The frescos of the Pauline Chapel were painted between 1542 and 1549. They represent the conversion of St. Paul and the martyrdom of St. Peter. He succeeded Antonio da Sangallo in 1546 in the offices which he held, and became architect of St Peter's Jan. 1, 1547. From this time until his death he worked on the church without compensation. The dome alone was completed with any regard to his plans.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Michelangelo" Quotes from Famous Books



... equality with the man painting the church?" said Paula. "No, indeed! not if he were Fra Angelico and Ary Scheffer and Michelangelo rolled ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... "the last edition," produces a Bill Nye, a Sam Jones, a Teddy Roosevelt, a DeWitt Talmage, a Hopkinson Smith, a Sam Walter Foss, a Victor Herbert; but it is not at all likely to produce a Praxiteles, a Michelangelo, a Rembrandt, an Immanuel Kant or ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard

... entered that of Caesar Borgia, as military engineer, and the greatest painter of the age became inspector of a despot's strongholds. But his restless nature did not leave him long at this. Returning to Florence he competed with Michelangelo; yet the service of even his native city could not retain him. His fame had attracted the attention of a new patron of the arts, prince of the state which had conquered his first master. In this his last venture, he ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci

... me in his arms, and swept off with me on the wings of the wind. On one of the iridescent clouds we encountered the figure of Moses. The features were those familiar to me out of my childhood in the statue by Michelangelo. The Messiah called to Moses: It is for this child that I have prayed. But to me he said: Go, declare to the Jews that I shall come soon and perform great wonders and great deeds for my people and for ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl

... is not vice: it is as good to me as it was to Caesar, Alexander, Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It was first of all made a sin by monasticism, and it has been made a crime in recent times, by the Goths—the Germans and English—who have done little or nothing since to refine or exalt the ideals of humanity. They all damn the ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... began to pour into the galleries, cabinets, and libraries of Paris. A few brave voices among the artists of the capital protested against the desecration; the nation at large was tipsy with delight, and would not listen. Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, Correggio, Giorgione, and Paul Veronese, with all the lesser masters, were stowed in the holds of frigates and despatched by way of Toulon toward the new Rome; while Monge and Berthollet ransacked the scientific collections of Milan and Parma for their rarest specimens. Science, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... greater name in Italian art—therefore no greater in art—than that of Titian. If the Venetian master does not soar as high as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, so mysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half-veil them from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfect balance, not less of spirit than of answering ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips

... classes. Some, looking to political changes, turn to the reign of Louis XI of France, noting him as the first modern king, or to the downfall of Charles the Bold, the last great feudal noble. Others name later starting-points such as the establishment of modern art by Michelangelo and Raphael at Rome, the discovery of America, with its opening of vast new lands for the pent-up population of narrow Europe, or the Reformation, which has been called man's revolt against superstition, the establishment of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson

... Dante's deep religious feeling and belief in his own divine mission, see J. R. Lowell, Among my Books, vol. i, p. 36. For a remarkable series of coloured engravings, showing Dante's whole cosmology, see La Materia della Divina Comedia di Dante dichiriata in vi tavole, da Michelangelo Caetani, published by the monks of Monte Cassino, to whose kindness I am indebted for ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... as Pio Rajna has shown, "the rifacimento of two earlier popular poems," was written to amuse Lucrezia Tornabuoni, the mother of Lorenzo de' Medici, and that it was recited, canto by canto, in the presence of such guests as Poliziano, Ficino, and Michelangelo Buonarotti; but how "it struck these contemporaries," and whether a subtler instinct permitted them to untwist the strands and to appraise the component parts at their precise ethical and spiritual value, are questions for the exercise ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... energy which impelled Roger Bacon, Galileo, and Paracelsus in their searchings into nature. His the beauty that allured Fra Angelica and Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, that inspired the genius of Michelangelo, that shone before the eyes of Murillo, and that gave the power that raised the marvels of the world, the Duomo of Milan, the San Marco of Venice, the Cathedral of Florence. His the melody that breathed in the masses of Mozart, the sonatas of Beethoven, the oratorios ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant

... Franois I. as to painting, and then Sebastian Serlio was summoned from Bologna in 1541 to fill the place of "surintendant des bastiments et architecte de Fontainebleau." Il Rosso-Giovambattista had been a Florentine pupil of Michelangelo, but refused to follow any master, having, as Vasari says, "a certain inkling of his own." Franois I. was delighted with him at first, and made him head of all the Italian colony at Fontainebleau, where he was known as "Maitre Roux." But in two years the king was longing to patronize some other ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... it at its best in architecture, sculpture, and painting. And we cannot help admiring it, for it is amazingly beautiful. Yet it is not Italian—the Italian of the Medici and Farnese palaces. Il Rosso was neither a Michelangelo nor a Carracci; but he set a fashion. He changed the face of art for France. Nor was it in painting and sculpture only. The Italian passion for devises, anagrams, emblems, and mottoes became the rage in Paris. It first ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley

... interrupted you in a discourse. Was it the celebrated harangue on the greatness of Michelangelo, or was it the searching analysis ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham

... great master of Italian prose, Pietro Bembo, set a high value on her powers of criticism; other men, almost as distinguished as the Venetian cardinal, besought her for advice on literary subjects. Foremost in her circle of admirers appears of course the great Michelangelo, with whom the immaculate Vittoria condescended to indulge in one of those cold platonic pseudo-passions which constituted the true divino amore of the idealists of the Renaissance. So here was nothing to cavil at, nothing ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... its great and special beauty further recommends this country to the artist. The field was chosen by men in whose blood there still raced some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great art—Millet who loved dignity like Michelangelo, Rousseau whose modern brush was dipped in the glamour of the ancients. It was chosen before the day of that strange turn in the history of art, of which we now perceive the culmination in impressionistic tales and pictures—that voluntary ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... There is no doubt that art requires technique, but it must be absolutely unconscious and individual.... Often the greatest pieces of art are rather rude technically, but they grip the soul and command attention for intrinsic values. This is apparent in the works of Michelangelo, of Shakespeare, of Turgenieff, and of Mozart. The beauty that fascinates us most is that which is most individual. I regard technique as a necessary but subservient element. It may, however, become dangerous and kill individuality as it has done with ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... northern and southern provinces of the Netherlands were united under Spanish dominion and the Catholic faith, they had only one school of painting. The Dutch artists painted like the Belgians; they studied in Belgium, Germany, and Italy. Heemskerk imitated Michelangelo; Bloemaert copied Correggio; De Moor followed Titian; to mention a few instances. They were pedantic disciples who united with all the affectations of the Italian style a certain German coarseness, and the outcome was a bastard style inferior to ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis

... Paradise Lost, although there is little resemblance to Elisabethan work—such as one notices in Comus and the {161} Christmas hymn—yet the style is rich, especially in the earlier books. But in Paradise Regained it is severe to bareness, and in Samson, even to ruggedness. Like Michelangelo, with whose genius he had much in common, Milton became impatient of finish or of mere beauty. He blocked out his work in masses, left rough places and surfaces not filled in, and inclined to express his meaning by a symbol, rather than work it out in detail. It was a part of his austerity, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... was reached, the movement broke. Already Botticelli painted Aphrodite, queen of the senses, supreme along with Mary, Queen of Heaven. And Michelangelo suddenly turned back on the whole Christian movement, back to the flesh. The flesh was supreme and god-like, in the oneness of the flesh, in the oneness of our physical being, we are one with God, with the Father. God the Father created man in the ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... in an age of light; and second, when Columbus, child of Genoa, the same city that mothered Mazzini, sailed the seas. The first Italian Renaissance we call the Age of Augustus; the second, the Age of Michelangelo. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... spiritual as in the physical world, on which depends all that we call, or ought to call, progress. A collectivist state, it is true, might establish and endow academies; but would it ever produce a Shakespeare or a Michelangelo? It might engender and foster religious orthodoxy; but would it have a place for the reformer or the saint? Should we not have to pay for the general level of comfort and intelligence, by suppressing the only thing good in itself, ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... work at the same time. To wed a woman and be weaned from your work is a tragedy; to wed your work and eliminate the woman may spell success. If compelled to choose, be loyal to your work. As specimens of those who got along fairly well without either a feminine helpmeet or a sinker, I give you Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Sir Isaac Newton, Herbert ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... giving evidence of the most refined consideration for all persons, and under every circumstance. The world received the gift of this artist from the hand of Nature, when, vanquished by Art in the person of Michelangelo, she deigned to be subjugated in that of Raphael, not by art only but by goodness also. And of a truth, since the greater number of artists had up to that period derived from nature a certain rudeness and eccentricity, which not only rendered them uncouth and fantastic, but often caused the shadows ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various

... particular stage by itself, so that we can find also in the history of Art the same sequence that may be pointed out in its nature—not indeed in exact order of time, but yet substantially. For thus is represented in Michelangelo the oldest and mightiest epoch of liberated Art, that in which it displays its yet uncontrolled strength in gigantic progeny; as in the fables of the symbolic Fore-world, the Earth, after the embrace of Uranus, brought forth at first Titans and heaven-storming ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... more highly complex and unified than actually existing persons. Such pictures symbolize for us the quintessence and highest level of definite types of life. Manet's "Olympia" and Goya's "Maja" belong here equally with Leonardo's "Christ" or "Mona Lisa," with Raphael's Madonnas and Michelangelo's gods and angels. In them is attained the most intense concentration of psychic ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... has not completed his description of the creatures, we can try now to form a picture of what he saw. No matter how we bend and squeeze, we are not going to get a Michelangelo-type angel. Look at figure one. Go back over the points that Ezekiel has described. You will see ...
— The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel • Arthur W. Orton

... death of Pope Leo X. in 1521, his executor Cardinal Giulio dei Medici, afterwards Pope Clement VII., restored to Florence the books which their ancestors had got together, and commissioned Michelangelo to build a room for their reception. The work was frequently interrupted, and it was not until 1571 (11 June) that the ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark

... lacking among the author's illustrations, but the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum remembers his repeatedly showing special interest in the sketch reproduced in John Addington Symonds's Life of Michelangelo, London, 1893, Vol. I, p. 44, and in Charles Singer's Studies in the History and Method of Science, Oxford, 1917, Vol. I, p. 97, representing Michael Angelo and a friend dissecting the body of a man, by the light of a candle ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... slightly reduced, of a sketch by Michelangelo for one of the bookcases in the Medicean Library, ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark

... you shall die and to the sky Serenely, delicately go, Saint Peter, when he sees you there, Will clash his keys and say: "Now talk to her, Sir Christopher! And hurry, Michelangelo! She wants to play at building, And you've got ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer

... The author also used alternative spelling in places (e.g. Epimethus rather than the more usual Epimetheus); this remains as printed. There is a reference to Michael Angelo on page 203 and in the Index, by which the author presumably meant Michelangelo; this has also ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... of the New Testament; repudiating marriage, yet himself most happily married and the father of sixteen children; holding that Aeschylus and Dante and Shakspere were not great in literature, and making Adin Ballou a literary idol; holding that Michelangelo and Raphael were not great in sculpture and painting, yet insisting on the greatness of sundry unknown artists who have painted brutally; holding that Beethoven, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, and Wagner were not great in music, but that some ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... colossal and achieve vacuity chiefly. They remind one of nothing so much as the huge, ugly, misshapen "giants" that stand before the old Palace in Florence, work of the obscure sculptor who thought to outdo Michelangelo by sheer bulk. And the first four of his symphonies, though less utterly banal and pedantic, are still amorphous and fundamentally second-hand. For Mahler never spoke in his own idiom. His style is a mongrel affair. The thematic material is almost entirely derivative ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... beautiful, grave, cruel, dignified, reverential, magnificent, but all with an exuberance of life and power that gave to Italian art its great place in human culture. The great names of the period speak for themselves,—Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Machiavelli, Benvenuto Cellini, ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop

... insecurity of Joseph in the Madonna della Scodella, and of St. Jerome in the Madonna bearing his name. Usually he preferred some momentary attitude caught in the midst of action. In this characteristic the painter was allied to Michelangelo, the keynote of whose art ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll



Words linked to "Michelangelo" :   sculpturer, sculptor, architect, carver, Michelangelo Buonarroti, designer, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, old master, statue maker



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