1. Becoming based on rich heritage
That true artistic truth and beauty, which manifested itself in the creations of Iktin and Phidius, Praxitele and Apella, was revived only after eighteen centuries of old and new development in the middle Italian high Renaissance, in the hands of Bramante, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Fra Bartolomeo and Rafael. Of course, it is not at all an accident that this pure style bloomed again in the sunlit fields of one of the peninsulas washed by the Mediterranean. Italy and Greece have long been sisters! Indeed, on Italian soil, a striking array of antique workshop works has been preserved. Indeed, in Italy, since the Middle Ages, its magnificent art has developed! The gift of stately and simple narration found Giotto here as early as the 13th century, and Masaccio, an artist who laid new paths and rose in Florence on the threshold of the 15th century, already to such an extent exalted and simplified the language of forms that the chief masters of the new century gave him hands through their heads the artists following him. Great masters and now become the head of the movement. It is the history of the Italian art of the heyday of the XVI century that is inseparable from the history of its leading artists. But just in the era of greatest prosperity, along with artists in historical development, their patrons, promoters and customers of works of art also played a significant role. Without the artistic flair of Julius II, the powerful, powerful will of the Pope from the house della Rovere (1503–1513), Bramante, Michelangelo and Rafael would hardly have been able to unfold their wings for the highest flights. But the popes from the Medici house, Leo X (1513–1521) and Clement VII (1523–1534) also cannot be separated from the development of a high renaissance; the dukes of the Medici in Florence followed in their footsteps, whose quarrels for domination ended with the fact that Cosimo I was elevated by Pope Pius V to the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1569. Under the cover of Rovere and the Medici, the great Tuscan and Umbrian masters of the heyday were strengthened. But along with the princely art, as we shall see, monastic art still played the role, the art of the town halls still fulfilled its duty, and the private art of architects, painters and sculptors was called to life by their patrons from noble citizens.
Fig. 1. Portrait of Clement VI
The two great masters, in the person of whom we honor the creators of the high Renaissance, Bramante and Raphael, were the Urbins, and the other three, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Fra Bartolomeo, were Florentines. On the initial activities of both senior masters, Bramante and Leonardo, we gave the concept already in the second volume, since the longest time of their life and work belonged to the XV century. Now we must explore their work in general connection. Bramante is in a new light after the research of Geymuller, Seidlitz, A.G. Meyer, Beltrami, Njoli and Carotti. Our knowledge of Leonardo da Vinci, based on previous research by Amoretti and Ucielie, was then greatly expanded through newer works by Richter, Gamemüller, G. Ludwig, Münz, Müller Walde, Sconyamillo, Seeil, Berensson, Solmi, Gronau, Horne and Mac -Curdy. Finally, Seidlits clearly and independently brought together all these studies. We are well aware of the life and works of Michelangelo thanks to his contemporaries Kondivi and Vasari. Archival investigations by Gaia, Milanese and Marquese added something to this. Michelangelo's letters were published by Milanezi, and his poems, recently translated by Roberthornov into German, were published by Gvasti and Frey. Of the new general reviews of his work after the book Gotti, it is necessary to note the especially great works of Herman Grimm, Anton Springer, His, Wilson, Symonds and Toda, joined by the newer works of Corrado Ricci, Golroyd, Knapp, Makovsky, Frey and willy-nilly Carl Yusti . The most important aspects of his art were thoroughly studied by Lang and Berenson, the special sections of his work - Karl Justi, Frey, Genke, V. Wölflin, Brockhaus and Steinman.
What we know about the life and work of Fra Bartolomeo was excellently compared first to Marquese, and more recently to Knapp. On the issue of his drawings there are studies of A. von Zahn and Berenson. The work of Passavan, as well as later Springer, Crow and Cavalcazelle, Müntz and Mingetti, is still at the head of the critical works on Raphael. The repetitions of his paintings were compared to Lyubka and Rosenberg. As an architect, Geymüller and Hoffman studied it, and Robinson, Rouland and Fishel studied draftsman. His life as an artist was traced to Wölflin, Strzhigovsky, Feuge and Gronau. The problem of his youthful development, which is related to the question of the ownership of the so-called “Venice Sketchbook” of the Venice Academy to Raphael, Pinturicchio, or, as we believe, to various Umbrian masters, before and after the strengthened works of Morelli (Lermoleva), occupied Kahl in particular , Koopmana, Shmarsova and Zeidlitsa. The study of his Roman workshop should still be based on the work of Dollmire.
Donato Angelo Bramante (1444–1514), a great connoisseur of the masses and proportions, became an architect in Urbino under the direction of Luciano Laurana, whose ducal palace surpassed all previous buildings of the Christian time with the classical nobility of the form language and at the same time under the leadership of Piero della Francesca he became a painter.
As a wall painter, he was busy in his early Milan time mostly with a decorative painting of one courtyard on Venetian Street, then heroic figures of Brera's warriors and paintings of the ducal castle, of which the powerful Mercury torso, mistakenly attributed by Muller Walde Leonardo, was preserved. The easel picture of his work Zeidlitz, Svida and Karotti rightly consider “Christ at the column” in Chiaravalle, a magnificent figure, stately in body shape, with a lively, expressive head.
As an architect, Bramante, no doubt passing through Mantua, reworked in Milan and the influence of Alberti. In San Satiro in Milan, he found his connection to painting in an original treatment of the wall behind the main altar, with which he gave the appearance of one side of the choir by cutting it into a flat perspective relief representing a portico with columns. The sacristy of this church is the perfect work of Bramante in Milan. In the dome and choir of Santa Maria delle Grazie, he gave the outline of the plan of the Cathedral of Sts. Peter in Rome with his semicircles at the ends of the main cross. The protruding niche of the church in Abbiategrasso (the year of its construction should be read according to Seidlitz 1497) also resembles its colossal niche before the Belvedere in the Vatican.
If Bramante arrived in Rome in 1499 and found here a huge Palazzo Cancellaria (Cancelleria) already in finished form with walls dissected by flat pilasters in the style of quattrocento, then you can decide, together with Carotti, to leave behind him a share in the construction of a clear according to the forms of its masses, the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso. But then, through the eyes of Merman Bramante, the powerful ruins of the Colosseum, the clear cool of the Pantheon, the finished forms of the arches of Titus and Trajan; and it was in his hands, with his innate flair of grandeur, the newly acquired language of classical forms merged with those creatures of architecture that begin a high renaissance.
Only from the drawing of Palladio and from the engraving of Lafreri do we know the Bramante Palace, in which Raphael later lived. Above the lower floor, the upper floor was sharply divided by two Roman-Doric semi-columns, and it was thanks to this rather strong contrast between the building parts and its return to the Doric order that the building acquired significance for the new style. The surviving creation of Bramante in the spirit of high renaissance is Tempietto (1502), an elegant, small round temple near San Pietro in Montorio in Rome. In both floors, the cylindrical core of a powerful domed building, bustling with strict sink-shaped niches with rectangular frames, is surrounded on the lower floor by a crown of 16 free-standing columns, connected by an entable with triglyphs. The elegant, strict monastic courtyard in Santa Maria della Pace (1504) by the location of its pillars-pilasters means a new style, as indicated by its location and vault of the square choir and apse of Santa Maria del Popolo, which Bramante (1505) renewed. He rose to the most magnificent of his creatures later, in the service of Julius II. The huge, powerfully conceived palace of the Board in San Biaggio (1505) remained unfinished. The classical Corinthian marble building was finished - Casa Santa in the cathedral in Loreto (1510). But all other creations of Bramante surpassed its annexes to the Vatican Palace and its new cathedral of Sts. Petra Three-story, extremely elegant proportions of the porticoes with columns (balconies) surround the three sides of the courtyard of St.. Damaz in the Vatican; majestically looking huge semicircular niche in front of the Belvedere, topped with a colonnade opening towards the top. Most powerfully the great genius of Bramante manifested himself in his new cathedral of St. Petra, the first stone of which was laid in 1506. During the eight years that the master lived, there were completed four main dome posts with their fluted pilasters, topped with merry Corinthian capitals, with part of the arches and cornices they carry, and in the southern branch The cross was so much designed by Bramante that in the basic forms and proportions of the middle part of the main building nothing could be broken. Otherwise, we know the projects of the Cathedral of Sts. Peter Bramante since their publication by Geymuller. It clearly follows from them that the greatest church in the world was to represent a building of a pure central type with a single middle dome dominating over an equally-pointed cross with the ends of branches rounded from the inside. The first ground plan, in which all the ends of the branches of the cross are still quadrangular, correspond to the image of the temple on the same medal of Julius II and the engraving of Andrue-Ducerso. Four magnificent, four-sided, tapering corners of the top corner of the tower should have helped balance the dome. On the temple-rich pillars, only the tall columns under the four middle gables were supposed to meet the tranquil outlines of the interior. In the background, Bramante, on the contrary, the branches of the cross protruding outward, ends in huge flat semicircles with columns freely bypassing them. And in fact, and in another case, the middle parts of the interior of the temple of St. Peter is filled with unaccountable surprise before his power to find and express the great chastely and majestically.
2. The work of Leonardo da Vinci
In Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), a creative, fiery spirit, with the penetrating gaze of a researcher, knowledge and skill, science and the will merged into one inseparable whole. The visual arts of the new century he brought to classical perfection. As a thinker and researcher, he was ahead of his contemporaries in all areas of the natural sciences and mechanics; and however, apparently, all scientific research, experiments and drawings from nature for him, a pupil of Verrocchio, were only relevant to the preparatory works for his paintings, statues and various building structures. Along with the anatomy of man and horse, he studied the linear, aerial and colorful perspective. But nature also allowed him to “look into its deepest depths, as into the soul of her friend,” and it is this unfading desire for nature that inspires his creations with the hottest artistic feeling.
Fig. 2. Self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci.
Collecting, critical checking, bringing over five thousand sheets of Leonardo's manuscripts in communication and publication, written mostly in reverse letters (left hand) and decorated with drawings with a pen, the most important of which are in the “Institute of France”, in the library in Windsor and Milanese Ambrosians (Codex Atlanticus), are obliged mainly to the works of Richter, Ravassona-Molliena, Beltrami, Ruveira and Lincheev Academy. His “Book on Painting” (“Tratatto della Pittura”), which is of interest to us, consists of scattered sheets. It was published by Dufrain in 1651, but the best edition of the list of the Vatican Library was made by Ludwig. A few excerpts from the book by Leonardo, paving new paths, are enough to make up a concept about it: “Painting is a mixture of light and shadow through all the various simple and composite paints”, “There is a great mistake of artists who paint a rounded object in one-sided light yourself at home and then use this picture for a picture with all-round lighting, as is the case in the open air. ” “Artists who study exclusively other artists, and not works of nature, are grandchildren, not sons of nature, teachers of all good masters.”
Leonardo’s activities as an engineer and hydraulic engineer are omitted here. His work as an architect-architect comprehensively disassembled Geimuller in Richter's work. Of the projects of streets and canals, castles, palaces and villas, churches of the longitudinal and central type, preserved on separate sheets of his manuscripts, then the project of the grandiose mausoleum and the domed tower of the Milan cathedral, which he furnished with still Gothic phials, was not executed. In most of his projects, however, the true creative work of the Renaissance connected with Brunelleschi, Alberti and Bramante, alongside which he worked in Milan, speaks. Everywhere he prefers central type buildings with an elevated middle dome. They all amaze with their organic combination of plastics.
Already in the second volume, we appreciated Leonardo as a sculptor. He was mainly a painter and felt so, but he developed his richest activity as a draftsman. His pictorial drawings with charcoal and sanguine, his delicate drawings with lead and white pencil, his full inspirations and life drawings with a pen, critically matched by Berenson, are part sketches for his large works of art, some of which are themselves small works of art.
His finely pen-painted landscape painting of the valley (1473; in the Uffizi), surrounded by rocky heights, is his earliest preserved work. But it is more picturesque and poetic for a much later landscape (in Windsor), depicting how a thundercloud breaks out like a rain over a valley dotted with houses. A simple and truthful drawing was made in the collection of Bonn in Paris (1479), perpetuating the traitor Bandini, who was hanged on one of the window jambs of Bargello in Florence. An even greater completeness of artistic life breathes a later drawing (in Windsor) with the figure of a young girl in a rush to the sky, which could be recognized as Dante's Beatrice. In the first picture, the strict isolation of the art of the 15th century is visible, in the second, the free vision of the new time. A number of the most important drawings of men's and women's heads, which Berenson considered to be the best works of Leonardo, Seydlitz recently attributed to Ambrogio de Predis. The peculiarity of Leonardo, reflecting the strange side of his being, is reflected in the gradual transitions from bizarre reality to the whims of strong imagination in those cartoons, of which the cartoon with a toothless topped with the bald head of the Windsor assembly is relatively pleasant. Among these portrait portraits of Leonardo should be noted his large, profile-profile portrait of Isabella d'Este in the Louvre, her own very expressive portraits painted by sanguine, of which Windsor's drawing endows the delicately outlined head of a master with long hair, with a large beard, the first temporal wrinkles approaching old age.
Best of all, however, one can trace all the steps of Leonardo's art through his preserved paintings. In his “Book on Painting” (“Libro della Pittura”), he highly elevated it over all other arts, and, like his words, with the same force and his works influenced the transformation of painting. Instead of a series of parallel constructions in one plane, usual for the 15th century, a freer and more rigorous grouping came at once, preferring the pyramidal arrangement and strengthening the depth. The transfer of several planes of the planes turned the painting into more real in its depth skolok from the world of phenomena, and this affected not only the greater physicality of the foreground figures, but also the improvement of the aerial and linear perspective of the distances. But a stronger pictorial effect gave a new, soft styling, based on light and shade, i.e., on the subtle transitions from light to shadow. “Sfumato”, or “smoky” merging of contours with local tones, was brought to the highest perfection. “Finally,” says Leonardo, “pay attention to the fact that shadows and light without outlines and edges turn into each other like smoke (and uso di fumo).”
The number of finished paintings by Leonardo is small, as indicated by Paul Ioviy and Lomazzo in the 16th century. В раннюю флорентийскую пору (1472–1481) одновременно возникли передний ангел в картине Крещения Верроккьо.
Fig. 3. Крещения Верроккьо
The Florentine Academy, this internally inspired figure, of which Leonardo already knew Vasari, as well as the small Louvre Annunciation, now generally recognized as genuine and made by composition still in the spirit of quattrochento, but new and deeply conceived in terms of chaste entrances. By the end of the same Florentine period, we attribute, as before, together with most of Leonardo’s experts, the precious undermaking of the stately conceived “Adoration of the Magi” in the Uffizi, by some researchers mistakenly considered to be the late work of the master. The horse that reared up with the rider in the background of the picture should be explained as a preparatory study of Leonardo, and not as a repetition of the project for the equestrian statue. Festively sitting Maria and baby in a luxurious landscape with ruins. With deep humility, on their knees, oriental, the lords of the eastern country approach the celestial Infant. The delight of amazement and joy embraces the audience expressing their mood in extremely lively and natural gestures. Quite the contrary, than in “The Adoration of the Magi” at least Botticelli in the same Uffizi, here no one thinks about himself, no one thinks about the viewer. New is the free beauty in the distribution of masses, designed with a depth calculation, and the effects of light and shadow are also true and ingeniously applied here. On the same ground is a bold underhand of St.. Jerome in the Vatican Gallery, perhaps, indeed, emerged somewhat later.
Undoubtedly, in the first Milanese era of Leonardo (1482-1499), a Madonna in a rocky grotto appeared.
A grotto with a remote entrance, some flowers growing on the ground, and a romantic view of the river valley, bordered by mountains, are transmitted in the spirit of painting of the fifteenth century. The sixteenth century is indicated by the perfect language of forms in the performance of the heads and hands of four figures, in the young naked bodies of the worshiping youth John and the little Savior, whom the mother sat down on the ground covered with flowers under the guard of an angel; The style of the sixteenth century also includes the freedom of the already pyramidal construction of the group and the “sfumato” pictorial execution. Amazing, smiling seriousness in facial expressions is the soul of Leonardo mood. The news published by Malaguzzi that in the early 90s a similar picture was commissioned by the church of San Francesco in Milan to the artist Ambrogio de Prediz along with Leonardo, but was performed by Leonardo alone, we refer to the copy of the London National Gallery, in which Ambrogio could also do most under the leadership of Leonardo. Earlier we consider the Louvre copy drowning in “sfumato”, as the initial order made for the mentioned church, which reveals Leonard’s own hand in everything.
Regarding the authenticity of portraits of this time, attributed to Leonardo, male and charming female portraits in profile in Milan Ambrosian, Louvre's Belle ferronnierre and similar to her, but in a more lively movement of a young woman with an ermine on the arm of the Prince of Czartoryski collection in Krakow, still not complete unanimity achieved; Ambrogio de Predizu and we attribute both portraits in Ambrosian.
3. Leonardo da Vinci Masterpieces
The second great work of Leonardo of the same original Milan pore was his “Last Supper”, a large wall picture painted in oil, preserved, unfortunately, only in the form of a ruin, but recently restored tolerably in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
Fig. 4. Painting The Last Supper
In the consciousness of the offspring, this great work lives primarily in the image in which the engraving of Rafael Morgens embodies it (1800). The enormous distance separating this creation from the works of the 15th century, as Wölflin clearly explained, is most clearly expressed when comparing it with the Last Supper, Domenico Girlandaio, written in 1480, in Onisanti, in Florence. The individual figures of Ghirlandaio are not yet grouped, and the groups are not brought to a convincing unity of action; John, in his old manner, still rests on the Savior's chest, Judas still sits separately, on the front side of the table, and the holiness of the faces, no matter how majestic some of them seem, is also indicated by haloes above their heads. All this is completely changed in the picture of Leonardo. The exalted figure covered in grief by the Savior, who has just uttered the words: “I will betray Me alone,” sits in the middle, slightly separated from the four groups of apostles, extremely expressive in movement. The arousal caused by his words among the apostles, who were positioned freely and symmetrically on six on both sides, was very skillfully conveyed. Forming groups of three people, in horror they shrink back, lean toward each other, point to the Savior, raise their hands as an oath sign, or turn to one another and to the teacher, demanding an answer. The apostles, sitting on the front of the table, where their seats were, sitting down or standing, squeeze between their comrades on the opposite side, and only this was achieved by a strict merging of groups, spiritual and physical, united by a great rhythm of lines. Strong, vital figures, expressive as separate characters of the head and hand gestures, are highly artistic with a perfectly calculated balance of masses. Such a combination of fascinating truth of life with the highest artistic insight has never seen Christian art.
The main work of the second Middle Italian period of Leonardo (1500–1508) is a masterful Louvre portrait, distinguished by all the charm of the new brush, the belt figure of Mona Lisa, the beautiful wife of the Florentine patrician Francesco Giocondo. Against the background of a distant, fabulously smoky rocky landscape, she sits somewhat tensely and straight in an armchair; on the arm of the chair rests her left hand, on which lay a beautiful right. No jewelry enhances the charm of a strong, filling body. Eyebrows in the then fashion artificially removed. The look of her brown eyes is chaste and seductive together, calm and full of life, expressing dignity and slyness together. Near her lips is that sweet, one-of-a-kind smile, which is the most intimate feature of Leonardo. At the same time, Leonardo worked on a sketch for a painting of St.. Anna, which was ordered to him in 1501 by the monks Servits of St.. Annunziata in Florence. The first cardboard with Mary sitting on her mother’s right knee and holding baby Jesus on her lap, ready to bless the approaching little John, was preserved, as Marx and Cook showed, at the London Academy of Arts. The second, amended cardboard, which caused in its time an excessive interest, formed the basis of a later picture of the Louvre, painted with oil paints. There is no boy John here, and the holy wives form a group, locked in bold construction by the infant Jesus, who, playing, tries, with the help of his mother, to ride a lamb. The location of the figures almost next to the first sketch turned here into a pronounced grouping of figures one in front of the other in bold intersections. There is no doubt that the students helped in the execution of this picture, but together with Seidlitz, we believe that the master himself stood much closer to execution than some researchers admit.
On the other hand, the new great art of Leonardo appeared in the “Battle of Anghiari” cardboard (1503–1505).
Fig. 5. Picture of the Battle of Anghiari.
The city council of Florence ordered Leonardo and Michelangelo to decorate two opposite walls of the town hall with paintings from Florentine history. But neither the one nor the other master chose important and state events. Leonardo depicted the battle over the banner on the bridge near Anghiari, where the Florentines defeated the Milanese in 1440. Unfortunately, the picture was never finished, and the cardboard was irretrievably lost. Only a small sketch of the master’s hands has been preserved. The Netherlands drawing of the Louvre, Edelink's engraving, represents a group of four horsemen of this cardboard; it is this group that shows that the picture of Leonardo differed from all previous images of the battles by the powerful transmission of the confusion of the swirling battle and the amazing rage with which the riders cut each other and their horses gnaw.
If we call the still blooming Leda Leonardo, the cardboard for which is known from the drawing of Raphael in Windsor, and the smiling John the Baptist of the Louvre, in a half-figure glistening with all the charm of light and shade of oil painting, we can finish the overview of the life of the Florentine magician, who was taken away in 1516 by Francis I to France, where he spent his last years in the castle of Clues near Amboise. The number of his surviving works, however, is small, but each of them indicates a step towards liberation from the limitations of the XV century. What Leonardo did not touch, everything in his hands turned into ever-valuable gold.
4. Contribution to the art of Michelangelo Buonarroti
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) is the most powerful artistic person that the earth has ever worn. Never, neither before nor after him has a single artist exerted such a predominant and lasting influence on contemporaries and offspring; and although he, as a model, proved to be fatal for the next generation, for whom the language of his forms was not, as for himself, an inner necessity, yet his own greatness thanks to this all the more triumphant comes to the fore. His poetic works, which are not the place, allow to penetrate deeply into the struggle of his passionate, demanding love, lonely soul with himself, with his God and with the ideals of his art.
As an architect, Michelangelo became the ancestor of all the grandiose peculiar quirks of the Baroque style. As a sculptor and painter in the Renaissance, he was such an exceptional human icon, like no other, but ordinary people whom he took for his paintings and statues, even with their inherent properties, imperceptibly in his hands turned into supermen and demigods. Powerful body forms and powerful movements, externally caused by the bold opposite of lines, and internally engulfed in almost world or even entirely world aspirations, stemmed from his most intimate experiences. After Phidias, no artist was able to achieve the sublime as Michelangelo.
As a novice painter, Michelangelo, in the thirteenth year of his life, entered Domenico Ghirlandaio's teaching as a novice sculptor a year later, and not earlier than 1488 (as Frey showed) - to a certain Bertoldo, the then superintendent of the Medical Collection of Antiquities at San Marco, a student Donatello, in the later period of his life. The further development of young Buonarroti in the painter took place in front of the frescos of Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel, and in the sculptor on the antiques of the Medici garden. From this very time, he wanted to be looked at exclusively as a sculptor. But fate still led him to painting. The most significant of his sculptural enterprises reached us only partially, while in the painting, imbued with his plastic spirit, he left the greatest works, united by a common connection. As an architect, he developed, however, in a remote dependence on Bramante and Giuliano da Sangallo, but in essence independently, thanks to the tasks that were presented to him.
His earliest sculptures show the claws of a lion. Marble flat terrain “Madonna on the Stairs” in the Buonarroti House in Florence recalls the late manner of Donatello’s school, but the powerful forms of the main group and the children playing on the front stairs are drastically removed from this school. The higher marble relief "Battle of the Centaurs" of the same collection, depicting a fierce battle of strong and slender people and centaurs, whose bodies and movements are reproduced with a perfect understanding of the case, reveals the direct influence of the reliefs of ancient sarcophagi.
Fig. 6. Painting the Madonna on the stairs
In 1494, Michelangelo lived in Bologna and performed an angel here with a candelabra on the sarcophagus of St. Dominica in San Domenico, then the figure of Bishop Petronius, as well as the recently-exposed group of the half-naked rider Procule. This group, more clearly than the previous works, reveals the bold form language characteristic of the young master, still influenced by the works of Jacopo della Querci. That Procule is the work of Michelangelo, Justy also insists on this, contrary to Frey. Makovsky showed that the ancient goddess of victory, preserved in the Louvre, was a model for an angel. Returning to Florence, he performed in marble the young John and the sleeping Cupid, sold at the same time for the antique. It’s still difficult to recognize, together with Bode and Carl Justi, the first in the Giovannino of the Berlin Museum, and the second along with Conrad Lange and Fabrizi in one thing of the Turin meeting. However, Michelangelo’s nude marble Bacchus in the National Museum in Florence, the first work performed by him in 1496 in Rome, remains quite authentic. Antique and modern, peculiar to the master, are inseparably connected in this reeling figure, the naked body of which is transferred with such vital warmth.
In the marble group of the suffering Mother of God with the dead Savior in the bosom, distinguished by such inner greatness and now adorns the church of Sts. Peter, Michelangelo has embraced with his personal outlook on nature and the life of his heart all that he owed to the Donatello school in Florence, the works of Kvercha in Bologna and the ancient plastics in Florence and Rome.
This noble creature is enveloped in a slightly more rigorous XV century, but completely imbued with the aspirations characteristic of Michelangelo. Returning again to Florence, the master in 1501 received an order from the city to carve the statue of young David from the colossal marble block left by his predecessor in the form of a fragment. This naked young colossus, aiming with a sling, guarded the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio from 1504 to 1873, and is now imprisoned in the rotunda of the academy. The figure of a brave young man is made with a striking sense of nature, all the individual parts, such as arms and legs, are executed extremely carefully, and the gorgeous head is enlivened by an angry expression. The restraint of movements is only partly due to the narrowness of this unit; Michelangelo from this accidental stump managed to extract strong, strong, faithful lives and original forms.
After these stately and rigorous works, Madonna’s beautiful marble group with a naked boy standing between her knees in the Church of the Virgin in Bruges and an elegant round relief with Madonna and two boys in the National Museum in Florence show a calmly balanced and beautifully decorated 16th century style in Michelangelo’s plastic art.
But then the first big painterly task fell to his lot. In 1504, his hometown gave him the execution of a battle-based painting from the Florentine history on the wall of the hall of the city council, located against the begun painting by Leonardo. Michelangelo chose an unexpected attack on bathing soldiers in the Battle of Cascin. He was not going to portray the turmoil of battle. He clearly strove to represent each group in the noblest images of each person and convey the diversity, naturalness and excitement of movements. All these strong people are animated by only one sense of fear of impending danger, one desire to escape. Michelangelo's work on cardboard was interrupted in 1505 by calling him to Rome, but also, in unfinished form, he became a school for the whole world. The best insights into the individual groups of this completely disappeared work give us engravings on copper by Marc Anthony and Agostino Veneziano.
Madonna’s adorable relief at the Academy of Fine Arts in London and the round painting at the Uffizi, this, perhaps, Michelangelo’s only hand-made easel painting, already implies the existence of cardboard with bathed soldiers. Madonna sits on her lap in front of Joseph and stretches her arms back to take the baby from him through her right shoulder, and her strong members are shown by placing them in the opposite directions; The same should be noted about the unfinished marble statue of the Apostle Matthew of the Florentine Academy, depicted in a bold, sharp turn. The victory of the line over the motionless mass signifies in this case the victory of the spirit over the body, and already here begins the style of Michelangelo in the transfer of movement, which carried the whole world with him.
5. Creativity of Michelangelo in Rome
The master was in the prime of his development when Julius II called him to Rome and handed over to him the execution of his tomb, which was never completely finished. But already in 1506, the pope withdrew him to Bologna and ordered instead of a gravestone with his posthumous depiction to perform his statue in bronze in a sitting position and alive, for the portal of the local church of Sts. Petronia. После двухлетнего труда это произведение было закончено, но оно разделило судьбу всех бронзовых работ Микеланджело и преждевременно погибло.
В Риме в 1508 г. Юлий поручил творцу «Купающихся солдат» самый значительный памятник фресковой живописи, плафон Сикстинской капеллы в Ватикане, ставший главнейшим произведением Буонарроти по своему мощному единству замысла и исполнения. Папа, по-видимому, имел основание отказаться при жизни от своего памятника в пользу этого единственного в своем роде создания, вызвавшего удивление всего Рима при освящении капеллы в день Всех Святых в 1512 г. Микеланджело прежде всего расчленил плоский свод на отдельные поля, вошедшие внутрь архитектурного обрамления, развитого, однако, не вполне последовательно. Из девяти полей плафона пять меньших обставлены фигурами сидящих в разнообразных позах нагих юношей, которые навешивают бронзовые щиты, чтобы украсить их дубовой зеленью, эмблемой Ровере. Четверо больших полей между ними занимают всю ширину плафона. Изображения всех девяти полей взяты из сказания о сотворении мира и из истории Ноя. На склонах свода по направлению к стенам восседают мощные фигуры пророков и сивилл. Четыре больших угловых клина изображают Юдифь и Олоферна, Давида и Голиафа, Медного Змия и Казнь Амана. В стре
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