Michelangelo Research Paper

the life and legacy of Michelangelo

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Mya S. Morse

Mya Morse

W0H2012

Research Paper

Professor Frazer

October 30th, 2018                        

The age of the Renaissance brought many of the greatest artist to ever live with one of them being none other than Michelangelo. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni or Michelangelo was a painter, sculptor, poet and architect that is usually said to be one of the best artist of the Italian Renaissance with his most notable works being done on the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. His other great pieces being the statue of David and the statue of Pieta. The mixture of how anatomically correct yet aesthetically pleasing each piece was it what really defined him. He also embodied the new philosophy and act of mixing aspects of life and culture into dramatic forms of religious, political, and scientific beliefs which is what truly defined most of the arts done in this period of time. Appreciation of Michelangelo's artistic mastery has endured for centuries, and his name has become synonymous with the best of the Renaissance Art and cause him to not only outshines all his predecessors but remains the only great sculptor of the Renaissance.

Michelangelo was born on the sixth of March, 1475 in Caprese, Italy but his family then moved to Florence while he was still an infant. Due to his father working most of the time and his mother passing when he as only six, Michelangelo was laced with a family of stonecutters where he soon learned how to use a hammer and chisel.

His father had come to the realization as Michelangelo got older that he would have no inclination in going into finance and was more interested in the arts due to him mainly paying more attention to painters than his schooling. So, at the age of thirteen, Michelangelo became an apprentice at Florentine’s Painter Workshop. He spent only a year at the workshop though since he then moved into the palace of the Florentine ruler Lorenzo the Magnificent to study classical sculptures in the Medici gardens. He was able to learn from the great sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni who taught him about many of the past great sculptors of their time as well as the masterpieces made in ancient Greece and Rome. Around this time of him being in the Medici gardens, he had made his first two sculptural commissions which were Madonna of the Stairs and Battle of the Centaurs which were both very intricate and sophisticated for a teenager to have created. He soon even started to look at the deceased to make anatomically correct nude pieces by analyzing the human form. It is noted that he said, "Whoever strives for perfection is striving for something divine." Which can be used to back up why he would want to perfectly recreate the human form.