Michelangelo: On and off the Sistine Ceiling

Creighton Gilbert's writings on Michelangelo are fundamental documents for both the interpretation of a particular artist and a more general understanding of Renaissance art. Gilbert is one of the finest and most lucid interpreters of this immensely complex and intriguing artist and his time. Michelangelo: On and Off the Sistine Ceiling brings together and illustrates a selection of Professor Gilbert's new writings and most important papers on Michelangelo. The volume begins with an overview of all of Michelangelo's work - in painting, drawing, sculpture, and architecture - to provide the chief facts and special characteristics of his life and work. It is then divided into two parts. The first contains essays on Michelangelo's frescoes on the Sistine Ceiling, including "The Proportion of Women," "The Ancestors," "Titian and the Reversed Cartoons of Michelangelo," and "On the Absolute Dates of the Parts of the Sistine Ceiling." In the second part, Professor Gilbert turns to the greater context of Michelangelo's world - Florentine art at the turn of the 16th century and the influences between Michelangelo and his artist contemporaries. These essays include "A 'New' Work by Sebastiano del Piombo and an Offer by Michelangelo," "Un viso quasiche di furia," "Tintoretto and Michelangelo's St. Damian," and "A New Sight in 1500: The Colossal." These essays, essential readings in the history of Renaissance art, will interest not only students of art but all readers concerned with issues ranging from specific ties between artists to the cultural contexts of Renaissance art and artists.

Publishers Weekly

On the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michelangelo gave unusual prominence to women, his sibyls interacting with the prophets. And in depicting the ancestors of Christ, he showed nonheroic figures going about their daily lives. The artist's humanism and innovation are emphasized in these nine essays marked by careful scholarship and 95 black-and-white illustrations. Yale art historian Gilbert (Change in Piero della Francesca) begins with a concise biographical-critical overview situating Michelangelo amid the political and cultural ferment of his native Florence. He challenges the conventional chronology of the painting of the Sistine ceiling; examines Michelangelo's drawings of Cleopatra and Furia, an angry, shouting head; and discusses the shift toward the colossal by the artist and his contemporaries. (Nov.)