Michelangelo

536 years ago today, Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in Caprese, Tuscany.

Several years ago, I had the great good fortune to view a small portion of his works which are housed in The Louvre in Paris. It is absolutely amazing that a man with chisel and hammer can work a piece of stone and make it look as if it should be breathing...Breathtaking is a perfect word for his works.

As I have mentioned before, of all that I have seen (either in person or in picture) my favorite piece is without a doubt, the Pieta. Perhaps some day I will see it in person!

Michelangelo's Pietas
Loneliness and sorrow were Michelangelo's companions in the last years of his life. His younger friends, Vittoria Colonna and Luigi del Riccio were already dead, and in 1556 his faithful servant Urbino died too. In this period, he insistently produced studies and drawings of the Crucifixion and the Lament over the Dead Christ.

They were also the years of his last sculptures, including the Florentine Pietà, carved for his own tomb. Dissatisfied with his work, Michelangelo attacked the sculpture with a hammer, breaking off a leg and an arm from the figure of Christ and one of the Virgin Mary's hands. Another sculpture the so-called Rondanini Pietà, consisting solely of the figures of the Madonna and Christ, may have been begun by Michelangelo before 1550 but had remained unfinished.

Now his friends - we are told by Vasari - had asked him to start work on it again "so that he could continue using his chisel everyday." Still perfectly lucid, the almost ninety-year-old Michelangelo created one of his most spiritual images, in which the Mother and Christ almost interpenetrate in an indissoluble union, beyond passion and physical death.

Ironically, this Pieta is housed under the dome that Michelangelo designed in Rome, which is the dome of the Sistine Chapel.