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Early
Works
After being apprenticed
to Domenico Ghirlandaio for a year, Michelangelo was taken
under the wing of Lorenzo de Medici, known as the Magnificent.
One of the two marble works that survive from the artist’s
first years is a variant on the composition of an ancient
Roman sarcophagus. This composition is the Battle of the
Centaurs (C. 1492). The power of the figures foretell
the artist’s latter interests much more than does the
Madonna of the Stairs (C. 1491), a delicate work that
reflected the fashion of the Florentine sculptors.
Bacchus
Michelangelo produced his first large scale sculpture
in Rome, a larger than life figure of a drunken Bacchus
(1496-98), the Roman God of wine. This sensual, nude youth
is one of his few pagan works rather than Christian subject
matter and was based on ancient Greek and Roman statuary.
Made for a garden, it is also unique among Michelangelo’s
works in calling for observation from all sides rather than
primarily from the front. The statue, in a sense, was a condensation
of Michelangelo’s unorthodox education to date - his
immersion in the classics, his imitation and recreation of
antique sculpture, and his first experience of the eternal
city.
Pieta
The Bacchus led at once to the commission for the Pietà (1498).  He began in an unusual manner, by purchasing a horse and going to the marble quarries of Carrara to select the block. At 23, he completed this magnificent statue that shows the Virgin Mary grieving over the dead Jesus. The concentrated group of two is designed to evoke the observer’s repentant prayers for sins that required Christ’s sacrificial death. The complex problem for the designer was to extract two figures from one marble block. Michelangelo treated the group as one dense and compact mass so that it has an imposing effect; yet he underlined the many contrasts present; of male and female, vertical and horizontal, clothed and naked, dead and alive, to clarify the two components. The Virgin calls our attention to her dead son with her left hand, while her right arm embraces him gently, lifting his arm slightly so that it hangs lifelessly before us. |
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Michelangelo
returned to the theme of the Pietà late in his life, in two
of his most personal expressions : the Florentine Pietà
(C.1547-1555), which he meant to have placed on his own
tomb, and the Rondanini Pietà (1555-1564), a work that
remained unfinished when he died.
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