a conjurer of cosmic ideas........

 

     It is also true that having spent his formative years among the stonecutters of Settignano, Michelangelo had a feel for the material rare among artists and a respect for the laborers who actually did the backbreaking work of quarrying the stone.  He was able to spot minute imperfections that would ruin the finished work, and to judge the density and consistency of the crystalline structure that would determine how the chisel would bite into the stone.  Though Michelangelo did more than any other artist before him to lift the profession above the humble status of the artisan, he understood that such a leap into the stratosphere could not be launched without a firm grounding in craftsmanship.  He was something of a paradox, a conjurer of cosmic ideas who fussed over the slightest details of his trade, knowing that only the most perfect forms were adequate vessels to contain the vastness of his imagination.

-Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A  Life in Six Masterpieces

Michelangelo           Pieta            1498-99

a metaphysical quest...............

 

Michelangelo identifies with the biblical hero, casting himself as a patriotic warrior who uses his particular gifts not only to advance his art but as a weapon in the virtuous struggle of Florence against its enemies.

     But there is more to these lines than mere chest-thumping.  Michelangleo always conceived the sculptor's craft as a metaphysical quest.  This most material of art forms becomes in Michelangelo's conception a means of probing for pure spirit beneath a shell of gross matter, one that defines the artist as well as the matter upon which he works his will.  This was not merely an abstract conceit: Michelangelo saw the art of sculpture as, crucially, a process of self-discovery, of self-actualization.  In a passage that was almost certainly known to him, the late classical philosopher Plotinus used the art of sculpture as a metaphor for the means by which we perfect our moral selves: "Withdraw into yourself and look.  If you do not see beauty within you, do as does the sculptor of a statue that is to be beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes it there, he makes this line lighter, this one purer, until he disengages beautiful lineaments in the marble.  Do you do this too. . . ."  Reversing the analogy, the artist, discovering form within the mass, experiences release from his own carnal nature.  The giant slain by the sculptor's bow, then, is in some sense Michelangelo himself, or at least the grosser aspects of his nature that he defeats through the redemptive power of his art.

-Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces

Michelangelo        David        1501-04       

Teddy.............................

 

The worst lesson that can be taught a man is to rely upon others and to whine over his sufferings.

-Theodore Roosevelt