What do you know about Michelangelo? What century did he create in?

How do we usually
call this period? Which of his paintings do you know?
a) Read and translate the two articles.

How Michelangelo Painted the Sistine Chapel

from Great Names in History

The Pope Orders a Miracle. Pope Julius II believed Michelangelo could do anything and
ordered him to decorate the ceiling of the chapel. “But I’m not a painter,” Michelangelo protested,
“I’m a sculptor. I’ve hardly done anything with a brush and you want me to paint 2000 square feet
on a curved ceiling!”
“You’ll do a great job,” said Julius. “I’ll have my architect Bramante set up the scaffolding for
you.” He was a very tough man, more like a military commander than a pope, and he didn’t want to
hear objections. Once he actually struck Michelangelo with his staff for impertinence.
Michelangelo went home in despair. He was ambitious but the Pope was asking him to work a
miracle. If he failed, all his errors would be on perpetual display. Yet how was he going to paint
better than the painters?
The Great Design. Michelangelo considered his options. Though he had never painted in
fresco, he would have to learn the technique, and his first design was simple: the twelve Apostles
and some filler decoration. But soon he thought the ceiling was not going to look magnificent
enough and he obtained permission for a more ambitious plan. What Michelangelo then came up
with was a vast painting of three hundred figures illustrating the pre-history of salvation—Man’s
time on earth before the coming of Christ.
What is fresco painting? To paint on a wall old-time artists used a technique called fresco.
They mixed sand and lime and spread the mix over the wall. Next they applied their colors but
had to do it fast, while the wall was still wet or fresh. When it dried, the colors fused chemically
with the lime and became permanent.
A Little Help from His Friends. For his frescoes Michelangelo made sketches called cartoons
painted on canvas with watercolor. He knew about cartoons because he had made some for a fresco
project in Florence. But he hadn’t actually copied them onto the wall, and he needed some expert
advice. He wrote to his painter friends back in Florence and asked them to come to Rome and show
him how to get started. They came very willingly and painted part of his first panel on the ceiling
while he watched. But after only a week or two he realized he couldn’t do things their way and he
sent them away. He locked himself in the chapel and started, all alone, to copy his cartoons on the
enormous vault of the Sistine Chapel. Trial and error. It was unbelievably hard.
The Physical Effort. Fresco painting requires real physical effort. Every day the artist has to
mix up a batch of plaster and trowel it on the wall, then hurry to finish his painting before the
plaster dries. And painting a ceiling is doubly hard because everything has to be lifted, scribed, and
painted above your head. He stood on the wooden plank of the scaffolding sixty feet in the air and
worked looking up. He rubbed and rubbed his neck, it ached so…He drove himself to the limit. He
practically lived in the chapel, eating onions and stale bread. “I have no friends and don’t want
any,” he wrote his father.
The Great Setback. One day when he had completed about a third of the ceiling he noticed that
a mold was forming on his paintings. That was the last straw. He ran to the Pope, asking to be
allowed to quit the job. “I told you I wasn’t a painter,” he said. “Everything I’ve done is ruined.”
The Pope sent an expert to see what could be done and he showed Michelangelo how to remove the
mold and told him to go on.
A Barrel Vault. The ceiling is a
barrel vault with eight triangular
indentations above the windows. On
those and the four corner triangles, called
spandrels, Michelangelo continued his
depictions of the ancestors of Christ and
even covered the spaces farther down on
the wall, the so-called lunettes, above the
windows.
The Themes. In the middle of the
ceiling were illustrations of nine Bible
stories. The segment showing God creating Adam is one of the most famous images ever painted.
Other famous parts are The Flood and The Temptation and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The
huge Jonah above the front wall is especially admired for its foreshortening, which had to
contradict the curve of the ceiling to look right. The nude youths framing those scenes, twisting
and flexing with no apparent task, perhaps were meant to show Man’s futile struggle before Christ
came.
The Impatient Pope. Pope Julius was so curious to see what Michelangelo was doing in the
chapel that he would often drop in for a preview. He was awed by what he saw and he burned to
show the paintings to his friends. Finally he became too restless to wait any longer for
Michelangelo to finish... Though only half the ceiling was covered, the Pope ordered Michelangelo
to take down the scaffolding and open the chapel to the public…
The Awestruck Public. The public crowded into the chapel and spread the news that the
paintings were the greatest thing they had ever seen. The figures showed a new kind of beauty and
power. Each of them was a masterpiece in its conception and colors. Michelangelo’s vision was
overwhelming. Michelangelo set up the scaffolding again in January 1511. In a final surge of
titanic energy he managed to complete the other half of the ceiling by August 14 and Pope Julius
proudly celebrated the first Mass in his uncle Sixtus’ chapel. There were still the spandrels and
lunettes to be painted and Michelangelo didn’t finish
those until October 1512. Altogether the ceiling was the
work of fifty-four months…

Michelangelo: The Drawings of a Genius

by David Galloway in Art News
Albertina, Vienna Through January 9
The astonishing versatility of Michelangelo
Buonarotti, as sculptor, architect, painter, and graphic
artist, is firmly and consistently rooted in the genius of
his drawings. If there is nothing new in that insight, its
implications have perhaps never been so effectively
highlighted as in this sumptuous survey curated by
Achim Gnann. With more than 100 examples, culled
from its own collection and from 30 international museums, the Albertina documents how the
drawing served for Michelangelo both as a means for visual research and as preparation for works
in other mediums. Not just a muscled torso but even the curve of a finger or the angle of a foot
may have been preceded by a long, laborious phase of preliminary studies. Precisely how and
where these studies were integrated into finished compositions is demonstrated here through
computer simulations.
During Michelangelo’s long life, the drawing evolved to provide more than the foundation for
his other creative work. With his help, it would emerge as an autonomous artistic medium. That
process becomes visible here, as one moves from the earliest extant drawing (an apprentice’s
copy after Giotto) through the preliminary drafts for the Sistine Chapel frescoes to the late
depictions of the Crucifixion, reduced to minimalist forms by an artist approaching his 90th
birthday. The sheer scope reminds us of the fact that the artist reflected and influenced esthetic
perceptions from the early Italian Renaissance to the dawn of the Baroque period.
Several major projects, including The Battle of Cascina, the Medici Chapel, and studies for the
dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica, also receive attention here, yet the presentation as a whole maintains
a captivating intimacy. It is less the grand, theatrical gesture of works commissioned by popes
and potentates than the detail that takes center stage here. Above all, this is a humanistic universe,
with the body in all its emotional expressivity and heroic power as leitmotif. Thanks to the intimacy
of the encounter in this show, fresh insights become possible. One is struck by Michelangelo’s
efficient use of paper, for example; the artist often fills every available area with variations on a
theme. Since there was no scarcity of high-quality paper at the time, one might suspect horror
vacui—but perhaps the artist was simply too engrossed in his work to search for a fresh sheet. The
shifts in materials—from ink to black chalk to red chalk in the later period—were accompanied by a
formal evolution, as the master tested the esthetic potential of the chosen medium. He could achieve
more sculptural effects with black chalk, for example, and more painterly ones with red.
Such insights and speculations literally involve the attentive spectator in a perceptual process,
rather than a more passive experience of confronting certified masterpieces. This show, according
to its curators, intends “to reposition Michelangelo as a graphic artist.” One cannot underestimate
the impact of these works on both the artist’s contemporaries (who went to great lengths to
acquire his zealously guarded drawings) and those who came after. Interesting in this context is that
Michelangelo often provided artist friends with detailed studies for their own paintings, some of
which are also on view at the Albertina. Such gifts are a further, touching example of the generous
humanism that so vividly animates his work as a whole.