Young Michelangelo Quotes

“The Roman emperor, Augustus famously boasted that he had inherited a city of brick and was leaving one of marble.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Toward the end of 1508, when most of the rooms were already frescoed, Bramante brought in a new talent, Raphael Sanzio, to execute the library. When Julius had eyes on his painting in the Stanza della Segnatura, he fired the painters who had nearly finished the new decorations for his private quarters and ordered Raphael to redo their works as he saw fit. The paintings that had so stunned Julius is today called The School of Athens. In it, Raphael created a visual anthology of classical philosophy that included many recognizable portraits in the crowd of erudites. We see his self-portrait as a golden-haired youth of extraordinary beauty, Bramante as Euclid holding class in geometry, Leonardo as Plato exhorting Aristotle to lift his gaze upward. Michelangelo’s portrait is the most like him, down to his negligent dress. He appears in the center of the foreground as Heraclitus, the melancholy philosopher, slumped over a makeshift table, alone in his thoughts.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“With his wayward artist once again firmly in his grasp, the pope set to work surveying the old medieval wall of the northern periphery of the city.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Shrewdly and deliberately, Julius orchestrated every aspect of his building campaigns, tomb project, paintings, and ceremonial pageantry to convey the message that he was born to be-and had rightly assumed his God-given role as-his Christian Caesar.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Egidio incited Julius’s dreams of conquest with heady prophecies of the resurrection of imperial splendor in a papa; golden age, while Agnostino Chugi, the trusted financial mastermind of Julius’s inner circle, orchestrated the sale of indulgences.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“With Ghirlandaio and Fillipino Luppi dead, and Botticelli in a permanent state of depression, Raphael found an affluent audience starved for works of the highest quality. Florentine mercantile society fell in love with his potrayals of the Madonna and Child and the Holy Family-and with him, personally, for his gentle character. The provincialism of his master Perugino had heretofore kept Raphael’s genius under wraps. Leonardo taught him the power of unified, lucid compositions based on geometry, particularly the triangle and the circle. During Michelangelo’s absence, Raphael’s company was sought by everyone, including Michelangelo’s valued friends Taddeo Taddei and Agnolo Doni. In fact, he was such a frequent guest at Taddei’s home, where he would have had plenty of opportunities to study Michelangelo’s tondo, that Raphael gave his patron two paintings as thanks for his many kindnesses, and painted the Madonna deil Cardellino as a wedding gift for his friend Lorenzo Nasi, Taddei’s cousin. In 1505, the Carrera year, Raphael painted the portraits of Doni and his wife, Maddalena. The out-of-towner whom Michelangelo had dismissed as a mere nuisance had grown up.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“One suspects he disdained the traditional preparations of drawing and modeling in favor of cutting straight into the marble containing the captive soul yearning for release. The result is a kind of metaphor perhaps unconscious for the struggle of artistic creation. The only way Michelangelo could show us this was to leave the figure half-embedded in the rock.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Nothing about the figure alludes to its identity apart from the book, which remains embedded in the rough-cut rock like the rest of its body. Only the apostle’s left knee projects sufficiently to raise the shape of breaking out.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“A face half-trapped in stone is a terrible image, and indeed, Michelangelo’s renown for terribilita-which connotes the possession of awesome force begins here with this single unfinished apostle.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“By provoking separate studies of monumental male nudes in self-consciously handsome postures, he established the curriculum for generations of imitators.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Perhaps no artist in history had ever been treated so gingerly.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Soderini was obliged to explain to Julius that Michelangelo was not to take a step unless he had in his hand a letter of safe conduct from Francesco Alidosi, cardinal of Pavia, the pope’s closest confidant and the man who had overseen the initial transfer of one thousand ducats for the pope’s tomb. Soderini emphasized that above all, they must deal very gently with Michelangelo lest they cause him to flee from Florence, as he had already attempted twice.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Evidently, Michelangelo was intrigued to contemplate the aftermath of his own experience of eliciting beauty from abstract rock.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Having no beginning and no end, circles represent the infinite, ergo the divine. Giotto and the pope knew such things by heart.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Contracting the construction of a papal masoleum was nothing like being alone with his dreams and drawings, chisel and stone. Instead of working, he was writing letters, meeting contacts, arranging payments, obtaining permissions. It was a question of time.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“He was managing everything by himself and being pulled in too many directions.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Repeating instructions is a practical technique, but everything Michelangelo writes has this quality of pouring out his desires in the order they occur to him.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Marble that was still attached to the mountain vein, or freshly quarried, was considered alive because porous stone retains moisture absorbed from the ground. Quarry sap makes the marble soft, sparkling, and easy to work. After exposure to the air, this calcium-soaked water evaporates, and the stone becomes drier and harder-cotto, Michelangelo calls it in his contract.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“As a building stone, marble was first used extensively by Pericles in the construction of the Parthenon in Athens in about 438 B.C.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Mamo, the Italian word for marble, comes from the Greek marmairein, meaning “to shine”. Geologically speaking, marble is limestone transformed by the heat and pressure of the earth’s crust into a medium-hard, crystalline rock. Cold to the touch, marble yields willingly to the sculptor’s chisel. Over time, white statuary acquires an ivory patina remarkably evocative of the warmth of human flesh.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Despite their age difference-Pope Julius was sixty; Michelangelo, thirty-and their similarily contentious temperaments, neither man could believe that anything he passionately wanted would be denied him.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“The Divine Comedy brings together the whole sprawling welter of medieval contradictions about Rome and declares them pages in a single story: the Rome of the Aeneid is the Rome of Acts; the Rome of Caesars, the Rome of martyrs, the Rome of Minerva, the Rome of Mary; Rome, the Great Whore of Babylon (in Revelation), and Rome, the triumphant New Jerusalem.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“The myth of Rome’s everlastingness had been given relentless voice in Virgil’s Aeneid, only to shatter with the sack of Rome in 410.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“A passionate desire for posthumous glory was a leading motive for men of the Renaissance, whatever their calling.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“By the time Michelangelo arrived in Rome, the Belvedere hill was inclined in a massive building site that would eventually yield gardens, courtyards, porticos, and an open-air sculpture loggia fit for a Christian emperor.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“During the winter of 1499 Bramante came to Rome in search of patronage. He at once took advantage of his unemployment to immerse himself in the monuments, even dashing off a four-page pamphlet for classically-minded tourists.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“If Brunelleschie provided the intellect for the creation of Renaissance sculpture, Donatello supplied the heart.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Honoring artists on a par with military heroes was a humanistic innovation intiated at Brunelleschi’s death in 1446.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine