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Michelangelo Buonarroti (Renaissance artist)?

hey does anyone know a lot about Michelangelo? I need some help: - what was considered so special about his work? (how was it different or similar from other artists of the Renaissance period?) - what was his personal life like? - what new techniques or innovations did Michelangelo incorporate into his artwork? and i think that's all i need...i already found most of the info i need...if u have some really good websites or pictures of his work, that would be appreciated also! Thanks in advance! ♥

Public Comments

1. You should head to a library and look up Giorgio Vasari's "Lives of the Artists" - It's a book of biographies of Renaissance artists, and he interviewed Michaelangelo. It would probably help you out a lot. Here's a Michaelangelo site: http://www.michelangelo.com/buonarroti.html And here's wikipedia's info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo If you go down to the bottom of wikipedia's entry, there is a list of references - use that to find more info. Hope this helped a little.
2. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (March 6, 1475 – February 18, 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet and engineer. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci. Indeed it was said that a true Renaissance man needed to have all these talents and also to have been a diplomat and that Michelangelo was the only person to have ever embodied these criteria. Michelangelo's output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and the David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential fresco paintings in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgement on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Later in life he designed the dome of St Peter's Basilica in the same city and revolutionised classical architecture with his invention of the giant order of pilasters. Uniquely for a Renaissance artist, two biographies were published of Michelangelo during his own lifetime. One of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino ("the divine one"), an appropriate sobriquet given his intense spirituality. One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance, Mannerism.
3. First question: Michelangelo was revolutionary in the way he drew people as idealized versions of the human form, rather than flat "paper-doll" medieval styles. He studied corpses as a student in Florence, so that he could better understand muscles and the skeleton, and was one of the first to link science and art in this way. He was patronized by Lorenzo d'Medici, and was only one of many artists patronized by this wealthy Florentine banking family. Second question: His father was a minor official whose wife died young. Michelangelo was raised by a stonecutter and his wife, and later said that he"drank the love of the stone in with his wet nurses' milk". As a teenager, Michelangelo convinced his father to allow him to be apprenticed to Ghirlandaio, a fresco painter who quickly recognized Michelangelo's genius, and sent him to the court of the Medicis. There, Michelangelo proceeded to hone is art and get his nose broken in a fight. As far as romance goes, there wasn't a whole lot going on. historians now think that he was probably gay, but then,.in revisionist history, who isn't? Third Question: Ditto a lot of the stuff about anatomy and art as interrelated sciences. His use of color was more vibrant than almost anything ever seen before. his David, the Sistine Chapel and The Last Judgement are cornerstones of "Great Art" as we know it.