Michelangelo
Uploaded by Admin on Dec 11, 2000
Michelangelo was an optimist in his artwork and his sculptures. Michelangelo’s artwork consisted of paintings that showed humanity in its natural state. Michelangelo’s showed optimism in every figure he sculpted. Michelangelo’s sculpture brought out his true feelings of the world and how he viewed it. Michelangelo was optimistic in completing “The Tomb of Pope Julius II” and persevered it through its many revisions trying to complete his vision. Sculpting was Michelangelo’s main goal and the love of his life.
Since his art portrayed optimism, Michelangelo was in touch with his positive to the fullest. Showing that he had a great and stable personality. “Michelangelo’s artwork consisted of paintings and sculptures that showed humanity in it’s natural state (Munz 35)”. Michelangelo was called to Rome in 1505 by Pope Julius II to create a monumental tomb for him. “We have no clear sense of what the tomb was to look like, since over the years it went through at least five abstract revisions (Muhlberger 22)”. The tomb was to have three levels; the bottom level was to have sculpted figures representing Victory and . The second level was to have statues of Moses and Saint Paul as well as symbolic figures of the active and contemplative life- representative of the human striving for, and reception of, knowledge. The third level, it is assumed, was to have an “effigy of the deceased pope (Muhlberger 25)”. The tomb of Pope Julius II was never finished. What was finished of the tomb represents a twenty-year span of frustrating delays and revised schemes.
Michelangelo had hardly begun work on the pope’s tomb when Julius commanded him to fresco the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to complete the work done in the previous century. The mural overall consists of four large triangles at the corner; eight triangular spaces on the outer border; an intermediate series of figures; and nine central panels, all bound together with architectural patterns and nude male figures. The corner triangles depict heroic action in the Old Testament, while the other eight triangles depict the biblical ancestors of Jesus. Michelangelo conceived and executed this huge work as a single unit. It’s overall meaning is a problem. The issue has engaged historians of art for generations without satisfactory resolution. The paintings that were done by Michelangelo had been painted with the brightest colors that just bloomed the whole ceiling as one entered to look....