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Time-Life Library of Art
The World of Michelangelo: 1475–1564
In this outrageous novel from Joe Ide, "the best thing to happen to mystery writing in a very long time" ( New York Times ), the case of a young artist's missing mother sets IQ on a collision course with his own Moriarty.
Isaiah Quintabe -- IQ for short -- has never been more successful, or felt more alone. A series of high-profile wins in his hometown of East Long Beach have made him so notorious that he can hardly go to the corner store without being recognized. Dodson, once his sidekick, is now his full-fledged partner, hell-bent on giving IQ's PI business some real a Facebook page, and IQ's promise to stop accepting Christmas sweaters and carpet cleanings in exchange for PI services.
So when a young painter approaches IQ for help tracking down her missing mother, it's not just the case Isaiah's looking for, but the human connection. And when his new confidant turns out to be connected to a dangerous paramilitary operation, IQ falls victim to a threat even a genius can't see coming.
Waiting for Isaiah around every corner is Seb, the Oxford-educated African gangster who was responsible for the death of his brother, Marcus. Only, this time, Isaiah's not alone. Joined by a new love interest and his familiar band of accomplices, IQ is back -- and the adventures are better than ever.
Isaiah Quintabe -- IQ for short -- has never been more successful, or felt more alone. A series of high-profile wins in his hometown of East Long Beach have made him so notorious that he can hardly go to the corner store without being recognized. Dodson, once his sidekick, is now his full-fledged partner, hell-bent on giving IQ's PI business some real a Facebook page, and IQ's promise to stop accepting Christmas sweaters and carpet cleanings in exchange for PI services.
So when a young painter approaches IQ for help tracking down her missing mother, it's not just the case Isaiah's looking for, but the human connection. And when his new confidant turns out to be connected to a dangerous paramilitary operation, IQ falls victim to a threat even a genius can't see coming.
Waiting for Isaiah around every corner is Seb, the Oxford-educated African gangster who was responsible for the death of his brother, Marcus. Only, this time, Isaiah's not alone. Joined by a new love interest and his familiar band of accomplices, IQ is back -- and the adventures are better than ever.
202 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1966
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 25, 2020
Good book.
The pictures are very good. The text, by a Time-Life reporter, is also notably good; it moves right along, never gets bogged down in details. The bookflap reports:
"Robert Coughlan, a reporter and editor for Time Inc. for more than 25 years, is the author of biographies of William Faulkner and Maurice Utrillo. His interest in Michelangelo grow out of his research into Renaissance Florence and the House of Medici, in preparation for a book on Lorenzo. In 15 years of collecting material on the Renaissance he has traveled widely in Italy and Europe, and for two years lived in Rome."
68-9 Among the rapt listeners of this fateful monk {Girolamo Savonarola} was young Michelangelo. Much—probably too much—has been made of the influence this had on his later great works; while it is difficult to exaggerate the significance of Michelangelo’s religious philosophy in his art, his beliefs, as they developed, were far more profound than Savonarola’s essentially simplistic hellfire-and-damnation approach. However, for a youth as vulnerable as Michelangelo—rather shy and inward, acutely sensitive to the feel and look of life but inclined to a morbid view of it—Savonarola’s dread prophecies were bound to rouse feelings of tragic foreboding: a vision of man snared and perhaps doomed by his imperfections, his mortality, and by the follies and ironies of the human condition. And so, as Sir Kenneth Clark has remarked, “two essential ingredients of Michelangelo’s art, a passion for anatomy and consciousness of sin, were, so to say, poured into his mind” at about the same time.
74 A work of deep Christian piety, the Pieta also expresses Michelangelo’s Neoplatonic belief that physical beauty is the manifestation of a noble spirit. To critics who carped at the youthfulness of his Virgin, the sculptor had a ready reply—“Do you know that chaste women maintain their freshness longer than those who are not?”
86 What manner of man was [Michelangelo]? Ascanio Condivi gives us a notion of what he must have looked like as a young man: “Michelangelo is of good complexion; more muscular . . . than fat or fleshy in his person: healthy above all things, as well by reason of his natural constitution as of the exercise he takes, and habitual continence in food and sexual indulgence.... His countenance always shows a good and wholesome color.”
87 Michelangelo generally went to bed with his clothes on....
87 This anchoritic self-denial was in part, no doubt, a product of years of having to contribute every picciolo he could spare to his family’s support. Yet despite the continual drain, his income was now large enough so that he could have lived in comfort. Thus it was not just need that accounted for his ascetic ways, and these suggest that there was something in his character that found satisfaction in suffering.
88 Savonarola’s two related aims were the reform of Church practices and the reform of public morals. He used as his model the primitive Christianity of early times: like the communities of saints, men should live together in selfless Christian love, preparing for eternity while striving to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. But the Florentines were among the most cosmopolitan people ever known, prone to a full catalogue of vices, and marked by a temperament noted for capriciousness and a lively sense of the absurd. It was this unpromising material that Savonarola resolved to convert into a model Christian community.
At [Savonarola's] behest the Grand Council, dominated by his Popolari “weepers,” formally declared Christ the King of Florence. Sin, in effect, was outlawed: horse racing, gambling, profanity, ribald songs, prostitution, lewd performances and provocative female dress were now severely penalized. Servants were encouraged to tattle on their masters and mistresses, and children on their parents. Disciplined bands of youths, pledged to clean living and clean thinking, roamed the city collecting alms, pouncing on gamblers and sending women whom they judged to be immodestly attired back to their homes to change their dress.
91 Michelangelo’s David, in contrast, is a strapping specimen of early manhood at the peak of physical power and grace, superbly muscled and superbly spirited, filled with righteous anger and emanating intractable will and awesome force—a quality the Italians call terribilità. With the head of a beautiful Apollo and the body of a young Hercules, he is an apotheosis of all the most heroic qualities in all young heroes, a figure human in form but superhuman in his perfection of mind, body and soul. This David, in short, has only the most tenuous connection with the individual it purports to represent, or indeed with any individual. Instead it is a portrait of an Ideal for which the Biblical David was simply a convenient symbol. This David is not Hebraic but Greek, not scriptural but Platonic, not the son of Jesse the Bethlehemite but figuratively of Lorenzo the Florentine—and his godfathers were Poliziano, Pico and the rest of that great informal faculty at the Medici palace where Michelangelo had acquired so much of his education.
91-2 Platonism—or more properly Neoplatonism, a term that includes various embellishments of the original teachings—was in fact the primary influence in Michelangelo’s thinking about the nature of the world and of man, and about his own proper role as a man, a citizen and an artist. For years it was the primary influence in his religious outlook, too, though in time he veered toward a more orthodox Christianity. It was a comprehensive philosophy, but here our concern is with the way in which it influenced Michelangelo’s art, and in that regard the principal element was the Platonic doctrine of “Ideal Forms.”
Platonism held that the visible world and all the things thereof—whether as solid as mountains or as intangible as human emotions—represent imperfect copies of the Ideal Forms of these things which exist in the realm of pure spirit. The human soul came from this Ideal realm and still has memories of it, however dim, and hence is bound to be dissatisfied with earthly, imperfect existence. Death enables the soul to return to the Ideal realm—if the person has lived a life in pursuit of the good, the true and the beautiful. It is the love of these things, which are simply other names for the Ideal, that enables the soul to find its way back to God.
Love is awakened by beauty, in the first instance by the beauty of another person; but then it proceeds by stages to higher levels so that the soul appreciates beauty of character, of thought, of all goodness and all things perfect. Finally, having come so far, the virtuous person will find a supreme beauty, the source from which all other beauties flow. Love is thus the catalyst and binder of the universe: in a manner of speaking, Love is God. And since beauty is the visible initiator of love, it follows that those who create and encourage beauty, such as artists and philosophers, are acolytes in the divine mystery. By seeking beauty, they seek God. But also, in a phrase from a later age, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty”: to know truth, one must seek knowledge. Thus the pursuit of knowledge is a moral requirement, for it leads to the understanding of what is truly good and virtuous and sets one on the proper pathway to the Ideal realm.
All of this was absorbed into Michelangelo’s thinking and much of it became manifest in the David. Charles de Tolnay has defined this thinking compactly: “He did not intend to represent things as the human eye sees them but as they are in essence.... Michelangelo treats form . . . as nature intends it, before it becomes marred by the vicissitudes of life.... It follow that the artistic concetto (the Idea) is the inner image that the artist creates for himself of nature’s intentions.”
137 Michelangelo ... felt no need to show [his subjects] as they were [in real life] because a thousand years later the question of what they had looked like would be of no importance to anyone. Instead he used them as an artistic device for the creation of allegories which, for the sake of convenience, have come to be known as the Contemplative Life and the Active Life, but which are so profoundly rich in meanings, so evocative and yet so mysterious, that no titles suffice. Every beholder brings to them the thoughts that lie deep within himself. The titles are not important because the statues are not those of any two men who ever lived but representations of all mankind, and deal with the ultimate theme: the nature and destiny of the human soul.
162 While the Moses speaks for the almost divine nature of the sculptor’s power and his identification with the spirit, the four Captives still trapped within the marble tell of his awareness of the body as “the soul’s dark prison.”
167 [The Captives] offer a clear demonstration of how the sculptor worked: he would advance through the marble in so many parallel planes, almost as though he were peeling off layer upon layer of superfluity in search of the figure he had already seen in his mind’s eye lying locked inside.
169 In somewhat the same way, the Sack of Rome and the evil events leading to and stemming from it afflicted “the spirit or genius or soul” of the whole Italian Renaissance. For it undermined Renaissance man’s strongest sustaining faith, his belief that humanity had a at least the potentiality of being able to control its own destiny.
172 Most of [Michelangelo’s] poems were written for Tommaso dei Cavalieri... The poems were not published until some 60 years after Michelangelo’s death, by his grandnephew and namesake, and in the severe counterreformation atmosphere he was so afraid they would damage his uncle’s reputation that he pretended they had been written to a woman.
172 John Addington Symonds’ analysis of the love poems still stands: “This one idea predominates: that physical beauty is a direct beam sent from the eternal source of all reality, in order to elevate the lover’s soul... Carnal passion he regards with the aversion of an ascetic.” In short, the key to the poems, as to so much else in Michelangelo’s art, is the Platonism he acquired in boyhood at the court of Lorenzo.
172 They are nude because, for Michelangelo, the human body was an instrument for expressing the concetto or “inner idea” of all experience from Genesis to the Last Judgment.
179 At 85 he could still inspect the construction on St. Peter’s on horseback. Even as he approached 90 he rode every evening in good weather and regardless of the weather he went out walking.
179 His fever worsened, and he sensed that his end was near. And so, as Vasari relates, “Still in perfect self-possession, the master at length made his will in three clauses. He left his soul to God, his body to the earth, and his goods to his nearest relatives. He recommended his attendants [Cavalier, Leoni, and Daniele da Volterra] to think upon the sufferings of Christ, and departed to a better life....” It was a little before five in the afternoon of February 18, 1564.
179 He died disappointed in himself and his life, feeling that he had lost his way striving for less than eternal values. He did not believe in his “divinity”: he never doubted that he was a frail and all-too-human being, far from his own ideal of beauty, full of inconsistencies, a mystery to other and often a perplexity to himself. He felt himself a failure because, of course, he was bound to fail, his goal being the perfection that is beyond the attainment of any mortal. And yet, even in failing, by that very effort he partook of divinity. “True art,” he once wrote, “is made noble and religious by the mind producing it.” And the mind, the soul, becomes ennobled by “the endeavor to create something perfect, for God is perfection, and whoever strives after perfection is striving for something divine.”
———————————————————
Ingrid Rowland writes in an essay-review (2900 words) on Michelangelo, available here:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020...
that:
The pictures are very good. The text, by a Time-Life reporter, is also notably good; it moves right along, never gets bogged down in details. The bookflap reports:
"Robert Coughlan, a reporter and editor for Time Inc. for more than 25 years, is the author of biographies of William Faulkner and Maurice Utrillo. His interest in Michelangelo grow out of his research into Renaissance Florence and the House of Medici, in preparation for a book on Lorenzo. In 15 years of collecting material on the Renaissance he has traveled widely in Italy and Europe, and for two years lived in Rome."
68-9 Among the rapt listeners of this fateful monk {Girolamo Savonarola} was young Michelangelo. Much—probably too much—has been made of the influence this had on his later great works; while it is difficult to exaggerate the significance of Michelangelo’s religious philosophy in his art, his beliefs, as they developed, were far more profound than Savonarola’s essentially simplistic hellfire-and-damnation approach. However, for a youth as vulnerable as Michelangelo—rather shy and inward, acutely sensitive to the feel and look of life but inclined to a morbid view of it—Savonarola’s dread prophecies were bound to rouse feelings of tragic foreboding: a vision of man snared and perhaps doomed by his imperfections, his mortality, and by the follies and ironies of the human condition. And so, as Sir Kenneth Clark has remarked, “two essential ingredients of Michelangelo’s art, a passion for anatomy and consciousness of sin, were, so to say, poured into his mind” at about the same time.
74 A work of deep Christian piety, the Pieta also expresses Michelangelo’s Neoplatonic belief that physical beauty is the manifestation of a noble spirit. To critics who carped at the youthfulness of his Virgin, the sculptor had a ready reply—“Do you know that chaste women maintain their freshness longer than those who are not?”
86 What manner of man was [Michelangelo]? Ascanio Condivi gives us a notion of what he must have looked like as a young man: “Michelangelo is of good complexion; more muscular . . . than fat or fleshy in his person: healthy above all things, as well by reason of his natural constitution as of the exercise he takes, and habitual continence in food and sexual indulgence.... His countenance always shows a good and wholesome color.”
87 Michelangelo generally went to bed with his clothes on....
87 This anchoritic self-denial was in part, no doubt, a product of years of having to contribute every picciolo he could spare to his family’s support. Yet despite the continual drain, his income was now large enough so that he could have lived in comfort. Thus it was not just need that accounted for his ascetic ways, and these suggest that there was something in his character that found satisfaction in suffering.
88 Savonarola’s two related aims were the reform of Church practices and the reform of public morals. He used as his model the primitive Christianity of early times: like the communities of saints, men should live together in selfless Christian love, preparing for eternity while striving to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. But the Florentines were among the most cosmopolitan people ever known, prone to a full catalogue of vices, and marked by a temperament noted for capriciousness and a lively sense of the absurd. It was this unpromising material that Savonarola resolved to convert into a model Christian community.
At [Savonarola's] behest the Grand Council, dominated by his Popolari “weepers,” formally declared Christ the King of Florence. Sin, in effect, was outlawed: horse racing, gambling, profanity, ribald songs, prostitution, lewd performances and provocative female dress were now severely penalized. Servants were encouraged to tattle on their masters and mistresses, and children on their parents. Disciplined bands of youths, pledged to clean living and clean thinking, roamed the city collecting alms, pouncing on gamblers and sending women whom they judged to be immodestly attired back to their homes to change their dress.
91 Michelangelo’s David, in contrast, is a strapping specimen of early manhood at the peak of physical power and grace, superbly muscled and superbly spirited, filled with righteous anger and emanating intractable will and awesome force—a quality the Italians call terribilità. With the head of a beautiful Apollo and the body of a young Hercules, he is an apotheosis of all the most heroic qualities in all young heroes, a figure human in form but superhuman in his perfection of mind, body and soul. This David, in short, has only the most tenuous connection with the individual it purports to represent, or indeed with any individual. Instead it is a portrait of an Ideal for which the Biblical David was simply a convenient symbol. This David is not Hebraic but Greek, not scriptural but Platonic, not the son of Jesse the Bethlehemite but figuratively of Lorenzo the Florentine—and his godfathers were Poliziano, Pico and the rest of that great informal faculty at the Medici palace where Michelangelo had acquired so much of his education.
91-2 Platonism—or more properly Neoplatonism, a term that includes various embellishments of the original teachings—was in fact the primary influence in Michelangelo’s thinking about the nature of the world and of man, and about his own proper role as a man, a citizen and an artist. For years it was the primary influence in his religious outlook, too, though in time he veered toward a more orthodox Christianity. It was a comprehensive philosophy, but here our concern is with the way in which it influenced Michelangelo’s art, and in that regard the principal element was the Platonic doctrine of “Ideal Forms.”
Platonism held that the visible world and all the things thereof—whether as solid as mountains or as intangible as human emotions—represent imperfect copies of the Ideal Forms of these things which exist in the realm of pure spirit. The human soul came from this Ideal realm and still has memories of it, however dim, and hence is bound to be dissatisfied with earthly, imperfect existence. Death enables the soul to return to the Ideal realm—if the person has lived a life in pursuit of the good, the true and the beautiful. It is the love of these things, which are simply other names for the Ideal, that enables the soul to find its way back to God.
Love is awakened by beauty, in the first instance by the beauty of another person; but then it proceeds by stages to higher levels so that the soul appreciates beauty of character, of thought, of all goodness and all things perfect. Finally, having come so far, the virtuous person will find a supreme beauty, the source from which all other beauties flow. Love is thus the catalyst and binder of the universe: in a manner of speaking, Love is God. And since beauty is the visible initiator of love, it follows that those who create and encourage beauty, such as artists and philosophers, are acolytes in the divine mystery. By seeking beauty, they seek God. But also, in a phrase from a later age, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty”: to know truth, one must seek knowledge. Thus the pursuit of knowledge is a moral requirement, for it leads to the understanding of what is truly good and virtuous and sets one on the proper pathway to the Ideal realm.
All of this was absorbed into Michelangelo’s thinking and much of it became manifest in the David. Charles de Tolnay has defined this thinking compactly: “He did not intend to represent things as the human eye sees them but as they are in essence.... Michelangelo treats form . . . as nature intends it, before it becomes marred by the vicissitudes of life.... It follow that the artistic concetto (the Idea) is the inner image that the artist creates for himself of nature’s intentions.”
137 Michelangelo ... felt no need to show [his subjects] as they were [in real life] because a thousand years later the question of what they had looked like would be of no importance to anyone. Instead he used them as an artistic device for the creation of allegories which, for the sake of convenience, have come to be known as the Contemplative Life and the Active Life, but which are so profoundly rich in meanings, so evocative and yet so mysterious, that no titles suffice. Every beholder brings to them the thoughts that lie deep within himself. The titles are not important because the statues are not those of any two men who ever lived but representations of all mankind, and deal with the ultimate theme: the nature and destiny of the human soul.
162 While the Moses speaks for the almost divine nature of the sculptor’s power and his identification with the spirit, the four Captives still trapped within the marble tell of his awareness of the body as “the soul’s dark prison.”
167 [The Captives] offer a clear demonstration of how the sculptor worked: he would advance through the marble in so many parallel planes, almost as though he were peeling off layer upon layer of superfluity in search of the figure he had already seen in his mind’s eye lying locked inside.
169 In somewhat the same way, the Sack of Rome and the evil events leading to and stemming from it afflicted “the spirit or genius or soul” of the whole Italian Renaissance. For it undermined Renaissance man’s strongest sustaining faith, his belief that humanity had a at least the potentiality of being able to control its own destiny.
172 Most of [Michelangelo’s] poems were written for Tommaso dei Cavalieri... The poems were not published until some 60 years after Michelangelo’s death, by his grandnephew and namesake, and in the severe counterreformation atmosphere he was so afraid they would damage his uncle’s reputation that he pretended they had been written to a woman.
172 John Addington Symonds’ analysis of the love poems still stands: “This one idea predominates: that physical beauty is a direct beam sent from the eternal source of all reality, in order to elevate the lover’s soul... Carnal passion he regards with the aversion of an ascetic.” In short, the key to the poems, as to so much else in Michelangelo’s art, is the Platonism he acquired in boyhood at the court of Lorenzo.
172 They are nude because, for Michelangelo, the human body was an instrument for expressing the concetto or “inner idea” of all experience from Genesis to the Last Judgment.
179 At 85 he could still inspect the construction on St. Peter’s on horseback. Even as he approached 90 he rode every evening in good weather and regardless of the weather he went out walking.
179 His fever worsened, and he sensed that his end was near. And so, as Vasari relates, “Still in perfect self-possession, the master at length made his will in three clauses. He left his soul to God, his body to the earth, and his goods to his nearest relatives. He recommended his attendants [Cavalier, Leoni, and Daniele da Volterra] to think upon the sufferings of Christ, and departed to a better life....” It was a little before five in the afternoon of February 18, 1564.
179 He died disappointed in himself and his life, feeling that he had lost his way striving for less than eternal values. He did not believe in his “divinity”: he never doubted that he was a frail and all-too-human being, far from his own ideal of beauty, full of inconsistencies, a mystery to other and often a perplexity to himself. He felt himself a failure because, of course, he was bound to fail, his goal being the perfection that is beyond the attainment of any mortal. And yet, even in failing, by that very effort he partook of divinity. “True art,” he once wrote, “is made noble and religious by the mind producing it.” And the mind, the soul, becomes ennobled by “the endeavor to create something perfect, for God is perfection, and whoever strives after perfection is striving for something divine.”
———————————————————
Ingrid Rowland writes in an essay-review (2900 words) on Michelangelo, available here:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020...
that:
masters like Michelangelo remind us that the urge to create has nothing to do with age or the lack of it, but rather with that inventive spirit both he and Vasari called ingegno—inborn wit, cleverness, genius. The spirit often manifests young, but like wine and wood, it depends on age to reveal its full complexity. When Michelangelo turned seventy, as he does at the beginning of Michelangelo, God’s Architect, he had nineteen more years to live, every one of them spent at work. As dear friends died and his body weakened, he took on a remarkable series of huge, daunting projects, fully aware, as Wallace emphasizes, that he would never live to see them completed. In his deeply spiritual vision of the world, his own limits hardly mattered; God had called him, and he had answered.
Michelangelo carved stone with matchless speed and facility, but the fact that he shaped his works instinctively rather than by careful advance preparation led him into trouble as well as success; his studio was filled with half-finished projects, some of them impossible to complete, some of them familiar if silent friends. For years, he kept his monumental Moses at home as he struggled to finish its companion figures for the long-overdue tomb of Pope Julius II. Reportedly he smacked it on the knee and ordered, “Speak!”;
. . . the truth is that not one of Michelangelo’s creations can be conveyed easily in a photograph. The Sistine Chapel ceiling dazzles our eyes so dynamically because it curves in a gentle arch. David is meant to be seen from every direction, but the camera can provide only one. Without standing inside the Laurentian Library and the Medici Chapel we can never truly feel the way Michelangelo has shaped these enclosing spaces by the careful arrangement of solid columns, statues, cornices, and consoles. But his late projects present ... a steeper challenge. St. Peter’s is larger than our senses can grasp even when we are standing beneath its massive dome; there is no way to reproduce that disconcerting three-dimensional discomfort on a comfortably sized page.
January 31, 2019
Very interesting general read about Michelangelo and his times. It covers the artist's biographical life as well as his artistic merit, philosophy and output. But typical of this series, the book goes further. It touches on the pinnacle and fall of the Medicis, the various popes in Michelangelo's life and their influence on his work, rivalries with other artists including Leonardo da Vinci, and quite a bit more.
The easy-to-consume text is accompanied with stunning photos of some of Michelangelo's work, including a fold-out of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling.
The easy-to-consume text is accompanied with stunning photos of some of Michelangelo's work, including a fold-out of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling.
October 26, 2021
Even though this book is old, 1971, I enjoyed reading it and seeing the photos of the paintings and sculptures and architecture of Michelangelo. After watching Medici on Netflix this book really helped to put things into perspective and gave me a vision of what a great and brilliant artist he was. His mind worked non-stop and he never felt like he accomplished as much as he did or wanted to. He worked under several popes and worked and rode his horse up until he died at the age of 88.
Want to read
November 1, 2020Should have read this before going to Florence.
December 5, 2021
Amazing!! The man, the art, the book… Amazing!!!!
Read
April 8, 2023to-read
November 11, 2024
The book is written only for hardcore art lovers. Others will find it unbearably boring.
April 26, 2015
About time I finished this book! I had left it untouched since page 92, back in 2012 or 2013. Since that was quite some time, I decided to start over.
I really love the pictures they put in this book! So much incredible detail! It also delves into a lot of the history & politics in the world around Michelangelo, so that you can have an understanding & a better appreciation of what was going on in his life at the time, & how awestruck his audience would've been as he unveiled the masterpieces.
I think my top 3 favorites of his works are the "Pieta", the "David", & of course the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.
Many of the things he said indicate a sense of humor, as well. He seems like a very fascinating "Renaissance-Man-Turned-Ninja-Turtle", Lol!
I really love the pictures they put in this book! So much incredible detail! It also delves into a lot of the history & politics in the world around Michelangelo, so that you can have an understanding & a better appreciation of what was going on in his life at the time, & how awestruck his audience would've been as he unveiled the masterpieces.
I think my top 3 favorites of his works are the "Pieta", the "David", & of course the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.
Many of the things he said indicate a sense of humor, as well. He seems like a very fascinating "Renaissance-Man-Turned-Ninja-Turtle", Lol!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews