Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 13.djvu/475

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTL 433 MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI. identified uitli jmblic oflice in Florence. At the time of Jiii-helangelo's birth his father was Podestil (governor) of Chiusi and Caprese, Tus- can mountain towns tributary to Florence.. The infant was christened Michclagiiuolo, and upon his father's return to Florence was put to nurse with the wife of a stonemason of Settignano, im- biliing, as he himself said, the love of sculpture with his nurse's milk. Destined for a scholar, he was then placed in the school of Francesco d'L'rbino at Florence. Instead of devoting him- self to books, he spent his time drawing, and with painters' apprentices. By one of these, Jrancesco Granacci, with whom he had formed a friendship, he was introduced to the studio of the brothers Ghirlandajo. and after much ojiposi- tion on the part of his family, he was. in 1488, apprenticed to these masters. He does not appear to have learned much from his master Domenico Ghirlandajo. His drawings while there excited admiration and surprise, as did also his first painting, a transcript on panel of Martin Sehon- gauer's print, the "Temptation of Saint An- thony." In eom])any Aith Granacci, Michelangelo left Ghirlandajo's" studio in 1480, to study sculpture in the garden of the Jledici at San Marco. With the design of reviving sculpture, which had fallen behind painting at Florence, Lorenzo de' iMcdici had established an academy there, at the head of which he placed Bertoldo, a pupil of Do- natello. A marble masque of a faun (Utiizi), which ilichelangelo skillfully changed in accord- ance with the advice of Lorenzo, so pleased the latter that he invited him to live in his house, and procured his father a place in the Florentine customs. In the society of such men as Poliziano, the poet, Pico della Jlirandola, Marsilio Ficino, the Platonist, and Lorenzo himself, he became familiar with Itali*n literature and humanist culture. He was also influenced by the great political and religious movements of the day. To the spell of Savonarola's eloquence may be at- tributed, at least in part, his intense love for Florentine liberty and his deep religious feeling. His artistic training was an admirable combina- tion of Florentine realistic and classic influences. Through Bertoldo he became grounded in the works of Donatello; he studied the antique in the Medici collection, and sketched JIasaccio's fres- coes in the Brancacci Chapel. He was also, per- haps at this early period, and certainly later in his career, influenced by the painting of Luca Signorelli, of whose manner his own is a develop- ment in its most essential features. Of the two surviving woiks of his student days — both bas- reliefs now in the Casa Buonarroti, Florence — the seated "Madonna with the Infant .Tesus" is in tile manner of Donatello. The other, the so- called "Battle of the Centaurs," is in the over- rich style of late Roman reliefs, which were doubtless his models : but it shows the great, though still incipient, dramatic talent which marked his later works. On the death of Lorenzo in 1492 Michelangelo returned to his father's hoiise. Besides carving a statue of a Hercules, now lost, he devoted much time to the study of anatomy. In 1404 he returned to the palace of the Mediei, but, fright- ened at a vision foretelling their destruction, in October of the same year he fled to Bologna, and thence to "V^enice. At Bologna he foimd employ- ment for almost a year upon the shrine of San Domenico. He completed a statue of San Petro- nio by Nicola da Bari, and carved a kneeling angel of rare beautj', bearing a candelabrum, which, as Grimm has shown, was long confounded with another bj' Nicola Pisano in the .same church. In 1405, after his return to Florence, he carved for Lorenzo de' Medici, of a younger branch of the family, a statue of the youthful Saint John, now in the Berlin iluseum, realistic in style and much in the manner of Donatello. The sale of his next work, of which the original is lost, caused his first journey to Rome, and during his stay there, which lasted till the spring of 1501, he executed a number of important works. For Jacopo Galli he carved the "Bacchus" in the Museo Nazionale, Florence, a statue realistic to the verge of ugliness, and lacking entirely the ele- ment of divinity. To the same period belongs the well-known statue in South Kensington Mu- seum, which may be the "Cupid" that C'ondivi says he executed for Jacopo Galli, although Spi'inger has shown that it is more probably an "Apollo." The subject represented is a beautiful youth kneeling in the act of discharging his bow. But the chief work of this early Roman period, which raised him to the rank of the greatest sculp- tor of the day. was the "Pieta" in Saint Peter's Cliurch (1408-00), the first group, in the highest sense of the word, in modern sculpture. Seated at the foot of the Cross, the Virgin is represented with the dead Christ in her lap, gazing sadly at His wounded side and gently raising her hand. She is of youthful appearance, and of more heroic proportions than her son, whose dead body, the flesh of which is treated with marvelous delicacy, is reduced in size, to preserve the harmony of the group. .fter his return to Florence in 1501 ]Iichel- angelo, on June 5, signed a contract for fifteen statues of saints for the Piceolomini Chapel in the Cathedral of Siena. The inferior quality of these works, as they now stand, is such that it is impossible to attribute them to him. In August of the same year he received from the city of Florence a commission for a statue of David, nine cubits in heiglit, to be carved from a single block of marble. The statue was of national impor- tance, intended to mark the deliverance of the city from the Medici and Cesare Borgia. On June 8. 1504, it was erected to the right of the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio. where it re- mained as a .sort of Palladium until, in 1873, it was removed to the Academy of Fine Arts for protection against the weather. The figure is frankly naturalistic, head and hands being un- duly large, as in the case of the undeveloped youthful frame. The expression denotes ex- pectation and confidence of victory: the action represented is at the moment at which the youth is about to unloose the string. The "David" is the last work of Michelangelo's early or realistic period. A number of other works of the years 1501-04 cannot be exactly dated. While engaged on the "David he com- pleted, at the request of the Signory. another statue of the same subject in bronze, which was sent as a present to a high official of the French Court. Resembling the "PietH." thoiigh probably somewhat earlier, is the life-size "Madonna of Bruges," purchased by the Moiiscron family, and still in their chapel in the Cathedral of Bruges. He also carved two circular bas-reliefs of the Madonna, one in the Museo Nazionale. Florence,