Michelangelo and the Renaissance

Michelangelo was one of the greatest artists of the High Renaissance. He began his career with the chisel and ended it with the paint brush. He was a master in sculpture, engineering, and painting. Had he excelled in poetry, politics and arms he would have been considered a true Renaissance Manbut his focus was always on art. He spent 20 years of his life on the Sistine Chapel at a time when Europe was undergoing an internal religious and political strife that would tear it apart. His painting of the Last Judgment, which depicts Christs return to Earth to judge the living and the dead, is one of awe, dread and hope. Completed in 1541, just as the enormously important Council of Trent (1544-1563) was set to get underway, the Last Judgment represents a world in need of reminding of the promise of Christ that He would return. Through all of his work but especially through his decades-long labor in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo captured the essence of the High Renaissance and foreshadowed the coming age of the Baroque that would accompany the Churchs Counter-Reformation period.

The humanistic influences of the Renaissance were both embraced and advanced by Michelangelo. He depicted a hyper-idealized human form, often nude in depiction as though communicating the pristine, un-Fallen, innocent and perfect state that man was meant to have and would have possessed for all timehad he not chosen to disobey Gods commandment in the Garden of Eden. Normally, the Church would not condone nudity, but the humanism of the Renaissance had ushered in a new fascination with the art works of the classical period, all of it pagan and much of featuring nudity. The artists of the Renaissance experimented with naturalism in art, and the politics of Italy at the time were such that Italian leaders were happy to see naturalism in art having a provocative effect on the masses, for it distracted the public from the often shady dealings that they were having, particularly in the area of high finance. That said, the artists of the Renaissance approached naturalism differently, depending on their own stylesbut none had a style like Michelangelo. He created images of human beings as though they were supermenhis art could be called the very first super hero comic book art. Of course, doing so tends to cheapen itand his art was anything but cheap.

Nonetheless, this idealized expression of the human form can be seen in all of Michelangelos works, from La Pieta of 1499 to his David (1504) to the Creation of Man and the rest of the panels he completed in the Sistine Chapel. These are not forms that are meant to be realistically accurate: they are realistic in the sense that every muscle is accounted for and expressed through the movement and expression of the limbs, contorted and flexed to show off the way a body builder today demonstrates his muscular development. For the Renaissance artists, it was important that they be able to demonstrate their mastery of the human anatomybut for Michelangelo even this knowledge was not enough: he wanted to reflect the idealized form of man, the way God intended it to be. That...

His religious worksparticularly the Last Judgmentwere his gift to coming Baroque.

Michelangelo benefited Italy by enhancing its beauty and its majesty. In 1546, he designed the dome of St. Peters basilica in Rome, which today still stands. It was his final commission. He had worked under Pope Julius II on the Sistine Chapel. Under Pope Paul III, he would design the very heart of the Vatican, where popes were be placed for burial. He was the architect, artist, conceptualist, designer, and beautician of Rome, serving to enhance its majesty for all the world to see at a time when the Western world was writhing within itself over the question of whether it should remain loyal to the Pope and recognize the authority of the Holy See over the Church. King Henry VIII in England had been an ardent defender of the Catholic Church and the faithbut in his pursuit of an annulment from his wife, he threw over the Pope and the Church and became head of the Church of England, breaking England from Rome and ending the supremacy of the Catholic Church throughout his kingdom. Europe was quaking all around. Suleiman and the Muslims were invading from the East, stopped only by Charles V, who had to insist for years that the Vatican call a council to deal with the questions and arguments raised by the increasing number of Protestants in his own realm. Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were all on the march, all of them calling for an end to the allegiance to the Holy See. Yet here was Michelangelo, in his 70s, working on the designing the defining structure that would come to symbolize Romes majesty and authority for centuriesSt. Peters Basilica. Michelangelo, who began by chiseling the death of Christ out of marble, would end by designing the architecture for the house of dead pontiffs in the place where the Bride of Christ would continue to live, opposed as she was by the Protestants of the Reformation.

Renaissance Italy had been flush with wealth, since trade with the Near and Far East had increased following the Holy Wars. Italian merchants were a class all their own, influening society at every level. To show off their wealth, aristocratic families commissioned the best artists to work for them, to paint them, to create for them. Michelangelos powers for the better portion of his career were commissioned mainly by the Church. The Church wanted him for Herself. Just as the Baroque artists would attempt to depict the reality of natureof the imperfect peal that was fallen human naturein the face of the Reformation, which often sought a pristine return to form that could not really ever be achieved (no more than man could achieve the pristine form depicted by Michelangelo in his painting of Adam in the Sistine Chapel at the moment of Creation), Michelangelo depicted the joyful, sorrowful and glorious doctrines of the Church, unabashedly and with a power that awed one and all.

Because he was one of the greatest living artists of the time, he was in high demandand the fact that the popes of the era kept commissioning him shows that he worked for the very top people of the time. He was literally working for men who could be considered the most powerful in the Western world. Of course, their power was being challenged by the rising ProtestantsLuther, Calvin and Henry VIIIbut all the same these were popes who headed a very wealthy Church in a very wealthy country and could command the…