NAVIGATION

Biography
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ALL ARTISTS

• Salvador Dali
• Pablo Picasso
• Vincent Van Gogh
• Michelangelo

MICHELANGELO‘s first extant works are drawings after the frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio. Soon he began to work as a sculptor in a kind of free art academy maintained in the Medici gardens and supervised by Donatello's follower, the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni. Lorenzo de' Medici (Lorenzo the Magnificent) took him into his household (1490 - 1492), where he became acquainted with the finest intellects of the time, such as the poet Politian, and absorbed the Neo-Platonism with which his art is saturated.

His earliest surviving sculpture is the relief, the Madonna of the Stairs (c. 1490 - 1492; Florence, Casa Buonarroti), a disconcertingly un-youthful work for a boy in his teens. Here he looks back past all the charming Madonna compositions of the later 15th century and finds inspiration in the grander tragedy of Donatello's reliefs. The twisting, muscular forms of the heroic Christ Child and the struggling youths in the background, prophetic of the expressive figure style of Michelangelo's later years, are a foil for the towering, impassive profile of the Madonna. Soon afterward, this style was considerably developed in the tumultuous tangle of nude bodies that fill the relief, the Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths (c. 1492; Casa Buonarroti).

Here already is the essence of Michelangelo's art. The exclusive vehicle of his communication is the human body. But Michelangelo, far from accepting the harmonious reconciliation of spirit and flesh attained by his contemporaries of the High Renaissance, felt a torturing ambivalence toward the body. He loved it with the passionate intensity which would permit his skill to master its representation as never before, and would make his genius create definitive paragons of human perfection. Yet to the Christian mystic in him, the body was "the earthly prison of the soul" (a phrase from his own poetry); its perfections are of no avail, and serve Michelangelo only in the delineation of its doom. Even in this early relief, though the heroic forms are marvelously beautiful, their furious struggle seems curiously inconclusive and unavailing, and the tragic figures of the falling and the fallen, in which Michelangelo achieves unforgettable images of despair, already adumbrate the devastating pessimism of his maturity.