Synopsis
Based on established writings, as well as on more recent research, a comprehensive new biography of the Renaissance master draws a complete picture of the life and works of Michelangelo Buonarroti, including detailed portraits of his many relationships with friends, family, and employers.
Reviews
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1474-1564) contended that his destiny was sealed when he was suckled by a wet nurse who was the daughter of a stonemason. His David, Pieta and Sistine Chapel frescoes brought him renown by his 30s, but the biographer's problem is that he lived into his 90th year. What does one do with the rest of his life? Bull (Inside the Vatican), foreign news editor of the London Financial Times, handles the question as a thorough scholar of Italian art and politics. Since the two were inextricable in Michelangelo's time, Bull weaves his way through a mind-boggling succession of popes and wars of greed among major powers and minor principalities at a time when the papacy was a territorial player, and some of the most accomplished artists ever?Leonardo, Raphael, Bronzino, Cellini, Titian?were dependent on Vatican artistic and architectural commissions. Bull presents Michelangelo as a passionate creative genius whose inability to settle for less then perfection left him unable to complete much of the work he took on. Yet, he was also an entrepreneur eager for advances on the statuary, tombs and pictures he'd never deliver (his tomb for Julius II, even when reduced in scale, took 30 years). Drawn to muscular male bodies whose powerful evocations were the pinnacle of his art, Michelangelo also wrote effusive poetry to men to whom his affections were obvious, but he claimed in old age to have always observed sexual continence. However, he confessed, anticipating divine judgment, that he regretted having made art "both idol and monarch, like the things every man desires despite himself." Bull's crowded canvas challenges readers, but a complex and contradictory Michelangelo emerges. Illustrations.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This attempt at a panoramic biography of one of the dominant artists of the Renaissance reads more as a recap of the period's events than a persuasive dissection of character. Bull, a journalist (Inside the Vatican, 1983, etc.) and translator, seems more concerned with the times than the man: He's very good at weaving together a portrait of the social dynamics of patronage, the everyday lives of artists, and the political currents shaping and buffeting Florence and Italy during the Renaissance. But somehow Michelangelo gets a bit lost in the tapestry. The outline of his life is well known: As a teenager, Michelangelo was apprenticed to a sculptor by his impecunious father, who clung to the family's claims to nobility. The boy almost immediately distinguished himself. He proved to be socially savvy as well and was soon taken up by the immensely wealthy and powerful Lorenzo di Medici. For the rest of his life, he did not lack for patrons; several popes were among those who commissioned his work, although his ambitious, frequently monumental (and costly) works often made them uneasy. Yet his robust personality enabled him to negotiate the ever-shifting terrain of politics and religion. As a sculptor, architect, poet, and humanist, he came to define essential aspects of his era: its outsized appetites, intellectual curiosity, prodigious creativity. While Michelangelo was part of an immensely gaudy, violent, inventive period, Bull's book lacks any sense of the passion and excess that characterized the era; it pales sadly in the face of the artist's stupendous output and fails to plumb the sources of his art or to offer a particularly persuasive or detailed portrait of the man himself. A thorough and informative reference book that tells us much about the times but fails to capture the genius of one of our greatest artists. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
After translating and editing Vasari, Bull is well acquainted with the period, but his biography of Michelangelo is a perverse labor. The author repeatedly elaborates on the putative "context" of his achievement and advises readers concerned with Michelangelo's art to turn elsewhere. Instead of considering the raison d'etre of our preoccupation with the artist, Bull unreflectively drags readers through the miasma of Michelangelo's contentious relationship with his parasitic but beloved family, belabors the artist's complex dealings with powerful and sometimes frightening patrons, and forces readers to peruse the not-always-relevant political history of the time. Moreover, the more pertinent influences of contemporary religious thought and artistic theory are not adequately addressed. At times Michelangelo simply disappears from the historical recitation. Readers who might wish to learn something about the artist's art and who care to confront the great drama of his artistic and spiritual development will be left unsatisfied by this ill-illustrated, fragmented, and centerless exercise. An insightful introductory accounting of the artist's achievement can be found in Howard Hibbard's Michelangelo (HarperCollins, 1985. 2nd ed.).?Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Tech., New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The sculpture Pieta launched Michelangelo Buonarroti on a long, tempestuous career buffeted by his genius and the tangled political fortunes of his patrons, the Medici and the papacy. Bull, a translator of Italian Renaissance classics (including Michelangelo's letters), presents a workmanlike life for modern readers. He expressly avoids art history, as such, and instead describes the context of Michelangelo's creations--their commissioning, the vicissitudes of work, and the sporadic warfare that racked his native Florence and once threatened his life. Other elements Bull highlights, aided by the artist's correspondence, are the up-and-down relations within the Buonarroti family, which reflect Michelangelo's intense passions and sensitivity to affront, though, Bull writes, he would not long hold grudges. Observations such as these lend this biography its completeness and vivacity; why Michelangelo's paintings and sculptures seem on the verge of becoming sensuously alive develops well in Bull's narrative of how intense Michelangelo himself was, quavering before mortality yet exultant in glorifying mortal flesh. A sturdy work, with 70 illustrations, that offers libraries durable service. Gilbert Taylor
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