Overview
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was a sculptor, architect, and painter of genius and a poet and writer of great accomplishment. He was born in Caprese, where his father, a Florentine nobleman, was the visiting magistrate. He was apprenticed in Florence to the painter Ghirlandaio in 1488, and thereafter learned the elements of fresco technique and developed a lifelong interest in sculpture. His talent brought him to the attention of Lorenzo de' Medici and other patrons in Florence and Rome. In his lifetime he was recognized as the greatest living artist, and created a succession of masterpieces of sculpture, fresco painting, and architecture. In all his work, Michelangelo impressed his contemporaries as a forceful personality, a divine genius endowed with terribilita, or intense emotional power. Often portrayed as a solitary and austere figure, he in fact enjoyed a remarkable range of friendships, and those he loved and hated, served or resisted, are presented here, from his family and fellow artists to the popes, nobles, and rulers of Europe. In this new life of Michelangelo, George Bull places him firmly in the context of his time. He worked during three-quarters of a century of tremendous change in European society, and as an artist was supremely responsive to the hopes, fears, and values of his culture, which he both exemplified and defied.Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Journalist George Bull's full-length biography of Michelangelo re-creates all the social intrigue, political maneuvering, and vital creativity of Renaissance Italy and lends context to the role it played in shaping the most famous artist of the time. The tale begins with Michelangelo's spendthrift father sending him into apprenticeship in the hope of mining gold from his talent, and continues with tales of his legendary relationship with the Medicis. The book will be of particular interest to those seeking to understand the late 15th- and early 16th-century Italy in which Michelangelo lived and worked.Kirkus Reviews
This attempt at a panoramic biography of one of the dominant artists of the Renaissance reads more as a recap of the period's events than a persuasive dissection of character.Bull, a journalist (Inside the Vatican, 1983, etc.) and translator, seems more concerned with the times than the man: He's very good at weaving together a portrait of the social dynamics of patronage, the everyday lives of artists, and the political currents shaping and buffeting Florence and Italy during the Renaissance. But somehow Michelangelo gets a bit lost in the tapestry. The outline of his life is well known: As a teenager, Michelangelo was apprenticed to a sculptor by his impecunious father, who clung to the family's claims to nobility. The boy almost immediately distinguished himself. He proved to be socially savvy as well and was soon taken up by the immensely wealthy and powerful Lorenzo di Medici. For the rest of his life, he did not lack for patrons; several popes were among those who commissioned his work, although his ambitious, frequently monumental (and costly) works often made them uneasy. Yet his robust personality enabled him to negotiate the ever-shifting terrain of politics and religion. As a sculptor, architect, poet, and humanist, he came to define essential aspects of his era: its outsized appetites, intellectual curiosity, prodigious creativity. While Michelangelo was part of an immensely gaudy, violent, inventive period, Bull's book lacks any sense of the passion and excess that characterized the era; it pales sadly in the face of the artist's stupendous output and fails to plumb the sources of his art or to offer a particularly persuasive or detailed portrait of the man himself.
A thorough and informative reference book that tells us much about the times but fails to capture the genius of one of our greatest artists.