![]() He probably acquired some of his early knowledge by dissecting with Elia del Medigo, another philosopher physician who was a member of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle. This he did to please the Prior, who had given him a room wherein he dissected many dead bodies, zealously studying anatomy. Giorgio Vasari stated:įor the church of Santo Spirito, in Florence, Michael Angelo made a crucifix in wood, which is placed over the lunette of the high altar. Michelangelo made anatomical studies of the bodies obtained from the Santa Maria del Santo Spirito convent’s hospital. Michelangelo continually examined dissections and communicated with medical men and their writings. 8 ,9 There he may have met Giovanni Francesco Rustici (1474–1554), a Florentine nobleman, painter, and sculptor taught by Leonardo da Vinci. He became part of the Florentine center of humanism at the Court of Lorenzo de’ Medici. However, bodies were also stolen, skinned, and dissected-long before the infamous Burke and Hare, the Edinburgh Body Snatchers of the nineteenth century.īesides making drawings of dissections, Michelangelo also studied and drew from human models. 1471–1484), himself acquainted with medicine at Bologna, 10 permitted dissection in public of condemned criminals, if they were decently buried. ![]() When aged seventeen, Michelangelo had started his dissections of cadavers from the hospital at the Monastery of Santo Spirito after the death of his mentor Lorenzo de’ Medici. Many of Da Vinci’s wonderful drawings and notes were not discovered until the early 1600s about 600 of his surviving drawings were bound in a single collection and later discovered by William Hunter at Windsor, in the British Royal Collection. By 1513 he had dissected around thirty corpses. He acquired his first human skull in 1489, and between 15 carried out twenty autopsies at the University of Pavia in collaboration with the professor of anatomy Marcantonio della Torre. 6, 7 Michelangelo’s contemporary Leonardo Da Vinci’s (1452-1519) anatomical expertise is comparable. Much has been written in attempts to explain and rationalize the beauty of his works 2,3,12 and the way in which they reflected his knowledge of anatomy. In this respect Michelangelo was not unique. In the Lives of Artists, Vasar (1511 – 1574), the famous painter and historian described how important anatomy was to artists:Īgain having seen human bodies dissected one knows how the bones lie, and the muscles and sinews, and all order of conditions of anatomy. Many artists of the period tried to study anatomy in detail. The Church regarded dissection as desecration of the dead, but did intermittently permit dissection of the cadavers of condemned criminals. Few artists performed dissections, but most attended the public dissections of the local physicians and learned from extant anatomical texts. The Florentine Academy of Art had an obligatory course in anatomy, in which its students executed drawings from cadavers and skeletons, when available. Renaissance artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially those of the Italian schools, studied the human form. Its exuberant use of color became the chief source of the Mannerist style. Immediately celebrated, the Sistine Chapel ceiling displayed many figures in complex, twisting poses, including the fresco of the Last Judgment on the altar wall. From 1508 to 1512 he famously painted the vault of the Sistine Chapel with scenes from the Old Testament, from the Creation to the tale of Noah. 5 His next moves were to Bologna, then back to Florence, where he sculpted the famous David.Īfter working in Florence, he was summoned by Pope Julius II to create a sculpted tomb, a project with which he struggled for many years. 4 At age twenty-one he moved to Rome (1496-1501), where he carved the Vatican Pietà for St. Domenico commended him to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence. When thirteen years old he trained first as a painter with Domenico Ghirlandaio, then with the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovannunder. 2, 3 How he acquired his anatomical expertise is the focus of this paper.īorn in Caprese in 1475, he considered himself a Florentine, though he lived most of his life in Rome, where he died aged eighty-eight. It is beyond my ability to adequately appraise Michelangelo’s art many scholarly works abound. 1 Best known among his works are the sculpture of David, his Pietà statues, and the exquisite Sistine Chapel frescoes, including the Last Judgment, created c.1508-1512. He was recognized by contemporaries as a genius, a “Hero of the High Renaissance,” the only artist of whom it was claimed in his lifetime that he surpassed Antiquity. Michelangelo Buonarroti was an exception to the rule that the qualities of many brilliant artists and composers are realized and extolled only after death.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |