MICHELANGELO COMPLETE WORKS ART BOOK

Michelangelo lived and worked for nearly a century: he was born in 1475, was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio in 1488 and worked continuously-until six days before his death, in 1567. It was during these turbulent years that the medieval aspects of the Christian religion were swept away, especially by the violent surge of the Reformation; that the Polish astronomer Copernicus revealed to his contemporaries the true position of the earth in a heliocentric system; that men liberated themselves from the ways of thought of medieval Scholasticism to become spiritually free and independent individ-uals. No other artist managed, as Michelangelo did, to portray this change in his works, and no other man lived this change as intensely as he did. "But he who bears the palm from all, whether of the living or the dead; he who transcends and eclipses every other, is the divine Michelangelo Buonarroti, who takes the first place, not in one of these arts only, but in all the three. This master surpasses and excels not only all those artists who have well nigh surpassed nature herself, but even all the most famous masters of antiquity, who did, beyond all doubt, vanquish her most gloriously: he alone has triumphed over the later as over the earlier, and even over nature herself...".

Giorgio Vasari, contemporary and friend of Michelangelo's, described him like this. Through his words of praise we can discern the major trends and objectives of the period we call Renaissance, and those of its later artistic form, Mannerism. Artists, philosophers and princes, each in his own field, began to contribute to the expression of a perfect terrestrial reality. They represented it as spiritually independent, standing in opposition to the supernatural or divine reality, upon which all medieval values had been based. These ideals of earthly perfection found their only precedent and model in the actions and works of the Classical masters. Thus, in all spheres of life, the Renaissance man tried to imitate the ancients, to accomplish once more the deeds of their heroes and to adopt their most typical qualities.