Customer Reviews

The Young Michelangelo: The Artist in Rome, 1496-1501 and Michelangelo as a Painter on Panel; Making and Meaning (National Gallery London Publications)

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This book covers the evolution of the young Michelangelo's abilities as an artist, as well as the available details of how he spent his time during the period. The authors give persuasive argument for Michelangelo's authorship of a controversial early panel painting, and there is useful discussion of the relationships between Michelangelo's ideas in paintings and sculpture, as well as of their possible antecedents in the work of others.

But what makes this book such a gem is the detailed analysis of the techniques used in the panel paintings. Michelangelo's paintings, like his sculpture, have a unique power, clarity and imaginative force. The panel paintings if anything hint at even greater achievements, but unfortunately only one finished example has come down to us. The latter painting, the _Holy Family_, is one of the most perfect examples of renaissance art, and a tour-de-force of image-making technique. Although this book does not provide direct analysis of that particular painting's technique, in its analysis of other unfinished paintings it provides a great deal of information which illuminates the results Michelangelo achieved in the _Holy Family_ (including a long-needed explosion of the ill-fitting presumption that the smoothly blended forms of the latter were executed in tempera). Well-illustrated.