Michelangelo

By the age of 25, Michelangelo has sculpted the marble Pieta, which is on the left, in its original spot, when you enter the front of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

The Pieta was sculpted between 1498 and 1500, and it is the only piece of work that he signed.

This sculpture is one that ushered in the High Renaissance period.

The Pieta shows emotively the theological virtue of submission to God's Will, which Christians have celebrated since the beginning, and was exemplified in Mary. Holding her dead son, and Savior, after having watched Him die horribly on the cross, her expression is one of submission, some would say resignation, to the Will of God.

Michelangelo also shows her young, a traditional understanding of Christians that Mary gave birth to Christ somewhere between the ages of 14 to 16.

Michelangelo was buried as he requested, in Florence, in a fabulously sculpted monument that, though wonderful, hardly begins to do justice to his contributions.

He can be found in Santa Croce in Florence, the Church of the Holy Cross.

Michelangelo made two small free-standing figures (St. Proculus and St Petronius) for the shrine of St. Dominic in S. Petronio, and one pair of angel candelabra for the altar of the chapel. Clearly, he had been looking at S. Petronio's major masterpiece, the great portal carved by Jacopo della Quercia nearly sixty years before. He adapted the older master's directness of characterization, his admirable economy of gesture which concentrates the impact of the figure, and also the use of bulky draperies to give mass and weight.

1494-95
Marble, height: 51,5 cm
San Domenico, Bologna

cutting his teeth on his vocation...

more to come.

cutting his teeth...