Michelangelo On Parnassus

This book presents an original investigation of the relationship of a variety of authors (Varchi, Aretino, Foscolo, Wordsworth, Stendhal, Mann, Montale, Morante and others) with Buonarroti’s verse. Through close analysis of the texts, it shows why Michelangelo should hold a more noble position on Parnassus than that which historiography has hitherto granted him.

A Journey into Michelangelo's Rome follows Michelangelo from his arrival in Rome in 1496 to his death in the city almost seventy years later. It tells the story of Michelangelo's meteoric rise and artistic breakthroughs, of his tempestuous relations with powerful patrons, and of his austere but passionate private life. Each chapter focuses on a particular work that stunned his contemporaries and continues to impress today's visitors. From the tender sorrow of his sculpted Piet, to the civic elegance of his restoration of Capitoline Hill, to the grandeur of his dome atop St. Peter's, Michelangelo's work adorns the city in numerous ways.

A novel exploration of the threads of continuity, rivalry, and self-conscious borrowing that connect the Baroque innovator with his Renaissance paragon Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), like all ambitious artists, imitated eminent predecessors. What set him apart was his lifelong and multifaceted focus on Michelangelo Buonarroti—the master of the previous age. Bernini’s Michelangelo is the first comprehensive examination of Bernini’s persistent and wide-ranging imitation of Michelangelo’s canon (his art and its rules). Prevailing accounts submit that Michelangelo’s pervasive, yet controversial, example was overcome during Bernini’s time, when it was rejected as an advantageous model for enterprising artists. Carolina Mangone reconsiders this view, demonstrating how the Baroque innovator formulated his work by emulating his divisive Renaissance forebear’s oeuvre. Such imitation earned him the moniker “Michelangelo of his age.” Investigating Bernini’s “imitatio Buonarroti” in its extraordinary scope and variety, this book identifies principles that pervade his production over seven decades in papal Rome. Close analysis of religious sculptures, tomb monuments, architectural ornament, and the design of New Saint Peter’s reveals how Bernini approached Michelangelo’s art as a surprisingly flexible repertory of precepts and forms that he reconciled—here with daring license, there with creative restraint—to the aesthetic, sacred, and theoretical imperatives of his own era. Situating Bernini’s imitation in dialogue with that by other artists as well as with contemporaneous writings on Michelangelo’s art, Mangone repositions the Renaissance master in the artistic concerns of the Baroque from peripheral to pivotal. Without Michelangelo, there was no Bernini.

Abstract: The discovery of the actual manuscript was featured on the front pages of the major German newspapers and reported throughout the world. It consists of 334 pages, typewritten, with extensive handwritten amendments, notes, and edits. According to Gerda Panofsky, her husbanded had continued to expand and edit the manuscript until 1922, and was preparing it for publication when he had to leave it behind. In this study, Panofsky provides a detailed analysis of Michelangelo's artistic style, comparing Michelangelo directly with Raphael, and then later taking a larger historical view. This text offers important new information about the evolution of Panofsky's scholarship, as well as on the state of research on Michelangelo and the High Renaissance during a period of transition for the discipline, in which formal readings of artworks began to take precedence over artists' biographies.

This book examines all facets of the High Renaissance painter Raphael.

A groundbreaking account of the role of writing in Michelangelo's art Michelangelo is best known for great artistic achievements such as the Sistine ceiling, the David, the Pietà, and the dome of St. Peter's. Yet throughout his seventy-five year career, he was engaged in another artistic act that until now has been largely overlooked: he not only filled hundreds of sheets of paper with exquisite drawings, sketches, and doodles, but also, on fully a third of these sheets, composed his own words. Here we can read the artist's marginal notes to his most enduring masterpieces; workaday memos to assistants and pupils; poetry and letters; and achingly personal expressions of ambition and despair surely meant for nobody's eyes but his own. Michelangelo: A Life on Paper is the first book to examine this intriguing interplay of words and images, providing insight into his life and work as never before. This sumptuous volume brings together more than two hundred stunning, museum-quality reproductions of Michelangelo's most private papers, many in color. Accompanying them is Leonard Barkan's vivid narrative, which explains the important role the written word played in the artist's monumental public output. What emerges is a wealth of startling juxtapositions: perfectly inscribed sonnets and tantalizing fragments, such as "Have patience, love me, sufficient consolation"; careful notations listing money spent for chickens, oxen, and funeral rites for the artist's father; a beautiful drawing of a Madonna and child next to a mock love poem that begins, "You have a face sweeter than boiled grape juice, and a snail seems to have passed over it." Magnificently illustrated and superbly detailed, this book provides a rare and intimate look at how Michelangelo's artistic genius expressed itself in words as well as pictures.

At thirty one, Michelangelo was considered the finest artist in Italy, perhaps the world; long before he died at almost 90 he was widely believed to be the greatest sculptor or painter who had ever lived (and, by his enemies, to be an arrogant, uncouth, swindling miser). For decade after decade, he worked near the dynamic centre of events: the vortex at which European history was changing from Renaissance to Counter Reformation. Few of his works - including the huge frescoes of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, the marble giant David and the Last Judgment - were small or easy to accomplish. Like a hero of classical mythology - such as Hercules, whose statue he carved in his youth - he was subject to constant trials and labours. In Michelangelo Martin Gayford describes what it felt like to be Michelangelo Buonarroti, and how he transformed forever our notion of what an artist could be.

The most published and lauded woman writer of early sixteenth-century Italy, Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547) in effect defined what was the "acceptable" face of female authorship for her time. Hailed by the generation's leading male literati as an equal, she was praised both for her impeccable command of Petrarchan style and for the unimpeachable chastity and piety of the persona she promoted through her literary works. This book presents for the very first time a body of Colonna's verse that reveals much about her poetic aims and outlook, while also casting new light on one of the most famous friendships of the age. Sonnets for Michelangelo, originally presented in manuscript form to her close friend Michelangelo Buonarroti as a personal gift, illustrates the striking beauty and originality of Colonna's mature lyric voice and distinguishes her as a poetic innovator who would be widely imitated by female writers in Italy and Europe in the sixteenth century. After three centuries of relative neglect, this new edition promises to restore Colonna to her rightful place at the forefront of female cultural production in the Renaissance.

Sequel to Barolsky's Vasari trilogy and pendant volume in particular to Michelangelo's Nose, this book continues the author's examination of the poetic imagination of Michelangelo's autobiography in relation to his art and poetry. With his usual brio, Barolsky suggests that Michelangelo's concerns with poetic origins are linked in subtle, diverse ways to the meanings of Botticelli's Primavera, Signorelli's Pan, Piero di Cosimo's Prometheus pictures, Raphael's Parnassus, and Titan's Fete Champetre. Focusing on the unexpected importance for Michelangelo of the pastoral, Barolsky illuminates the role of Ovid both in the artist's biography and in his theory and practice of art. Conceiving his book as a contribution to our understanding of poetic imagination in the age of the Renaissance, Barolsky elaborates here on his previous discussion of Renaissance, Barolsky elaborates here on his previous discussion of Renaissance biography in the tradition of Boccaccio's fables.