Read Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel for Free Online Page B

conditions of light and shade. Then, in the act of painting, he would resolve this conflictingly lit jigsaw of shapes into a single unified whole. No other Renaissance painter drew with the same disregard for a consistent lighting scheme, and none worked with the same freedom from sketch to finished painting. Michelangelo could do this because of the skills he had shown as a sculptor — because of his unique ability to hold all the elements of a picture in his mind as if they were physical, three-dimensional presences. By the time he came to paint the image, it already existed so completely for him that he no longer needed to depend on his drawings. His celebrated rival Raphael painted his frescoes on to meticulously squared-up drawings that had been transferred to the surface of the plaster. But towards the later stages of the Sistine ceiling, when he was at his most assured, Michelangelo was able to dispense with such laborious methods. He painted The Separation of Light and Darkness , for instance, freehand. Study of the plaster ground itself proves that he did it in a single session of no more than eight or nine hours.
    Study for the ceiling

    Studies for Haman

    Michelangelo was extremely busy during the years that followed his return to Florence in 1501. He carried out several other commissions for sculpture, as well as demonstrating his formidable abilities in the field of painting. He painted the so-called Doni Tondo , a roundel of the Holy Family now in the Uffizi Galleries, for a wealthy Florentine named Angelo Doni. The patron is said to have baulked at the price of seventy ducats, whereupon the proud and volatile artist promptly doubled it. (Picasso, who greatly admired Michelangelo, was fond of playing the same trick on recalcitrant would-be collectors of his own work.) During these years Michelangelo also created a vast cartoon, or preparatory sketch, for a painting of a famous Florentine military victory, The Battle of Cascina . This was intended to be one of a pair of monumental frescoes for the main hall of assembly in Florence’s Palazzo della Signoria. The other painting, a depiction of The Battle of Anghiari , was commissioned from Leonardo da Vinci, but neither work got further than the drawing board.
    Michelangelo’s enormous drawing, which survives only in the form of a later copy, now at Holkham Hall (overleaf), showed a group of soldiers surprised by the call to battle as they were bathing in the Arno. With characteristic independence, he had treated the commission for a battle painting as the pretext for a complicated homage to the art of antiquity – a frieze-like composition thronged with naked male figures, each in a different pose, all suddenly energised by the urgency of a moment of crisis. The drawing was long preserved in Florence, where, according to Vasari, it became a kind of school for artists. Eventually it fell victim to its own fame: ‘it was left with too little caution in the hands of the craftsmen, insomuch that ... it was torn up and divided into many pieces.’
    The Battle of Cascina, after Michelangelo’s drawing

    No such fate befell the statue of David . The sculpture of the young hero, sling at his shoulder, was regarded in Florence as an apt emblem of the city-state’s own resolute determination to preserve its independence. Vasari indicates that the artist had always intended the work to be interpreted in that way. He also tells a story about the David that reflects on Michelangelo’s ingenuity in getting his own way. It seems that when Michelangelo first unveiled the statue, Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini unwisely tempered his otherwise fulsome praise of the figure by commenting that its nose was too broad. The artist rushed to remedy the fault, or at least gave the appearance of doing so:
    Michelangelo noticed that the Gonfalonier was beneath the Giant, and that his point of view prevented him from seeing it properly; but in order to satisfy him he climbed upon the