Customer Reviews

Three Worlds of Michelangelo

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To start off, I can't believe this book is out of print already! I'd still like to write a review, because this is a very good book and perhaps the publisher will do a new hardcover print run or come up with a paperback edition..... Mr. Beck is a professor of art history at Columbia University in New York City. One of the nice things about this book, though, is that it is written for the layperson. It is not full of technical terms and art world jargon. Even better, it is well written. Professor Beck has a very good style of writing so the book flows along very smoothly. I think the author's intention was to balance out the popular picture of Michelangelo as a tortured, ill-mannered genius. Professor Beck shows him to be, in some respects, a pretty regular fellow. For example, we find out that Pope Julius appreciated him for his ironic, sarcastic and apparently typically Tuscan sense of humor. Michelangelo also was always very much a person concerned with the well-being of his family. Although he never married and never had any children he was deeply attached to his father and his brothers. Once he started to earn some money he was always very good about helping his family financially. One of the strong suits of this book is that Professor Beck constantly shows us the humanity behind the artist. Although Michelangelo loved his father it is also true that his father never approved of his choice of career. An artist was not highly regarded back in those days and when Michelangelo decided to become a sculptor, well, that was even worse. Imagine going around with your clothes full of marble dust all the time! Michelangelo was always looking for approval from his father and he never got it. The book also covers Michelangelo's relationship with Lorenzo The Magnificent and Pope Julius II. We get an especially nicely rounded portrait of Julius as a warrior pope who was more interested in power and politics and women than in culture, but who nevertheless appreciated the talent of Michelangelo. He also had a fierce temper and when Michelangelo answered the question, "When will the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel be finished?" with "It'll be done when it is done..." threatened to have some lackeys go up and have Michelangelo thrown off of the scaffolding! My only complaint with this book is that perhaps Professor Beck goes a little too far trying to portray Michelangelo as a "nice" guy and basically somebody that really had no faults whatsoever. But as I wrote near the start of this review I think the intent was to try to swing the pendulum the other way..... Still, this book is very good and well worth reading.

James Beck has written a wonderful and easy read about the life of Michelangelo. By not focusing on details about Michelangelo's sex life, Beck has put a much needed focus back on the actual art work of the artist. Regardless of whether he was gay or straight, Michelangelo is a gifted and talented artist who will be remembered for eternity.

This biography might have been wonderful to me if it had not been spoiled by the author's foolish attempts to cast doubt on Michelangelo's homosexuality. This puts Beck into the same category with Irving Stone and Charlton Heston in The Agony and the Ecstasy. On the verge of the 21st Century to get yet another book denying that there were any great gay men in history is simply not acceptable.