Religious Art & Worldviews · Artists
Sculptor of the Pietà and the David, painter of the Sistine ceiling — the Renaissance's defining sacred artist, shown here in del Conte's portrait.
Tagged: Painting Sculpture Early Modern Devotional Iconic Renaissance Catholic
Michelangelo held himself a sculptor, and his religious work is a theology of the body: creation, incarnation, and judgment rendered as anatomy under strain. The Sistine ceiling (1508–1512) and the Last Judgment (1534–1541) frame a career spent in the Vatican's service.
His late Pietà drawings, made in devotion and given to friends, show the other register: spare, repeated, prayerful.
References
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