Michael Hirst

Jill Dunkerton

This book is the fullest account ever written of Michelangelo's early work - as a painter as well as a sculptor. The period of his first stay in Rome was a crucial five years in the artist's life when he created, among other works, the marble Bacchus now in the Bargello, Florence, and the celebrated Pietà in St. Peter's, Rome, and, as Hirst shows, also began his painting of the Entombment now in the National Gallery, London. It was during these years in Rome, Hirst argues, that he probably painted another work in the National Gallery Collection, the Madonna and Child with Saint John and Angels, better known for the last 150 years as the Manchester Madonna, which Hirst concludes is entirely the work of Michelangelo and not, as has been thought, of an associate. Hirst traces much that is original in Michelangelo's though - this troubling interpretation of the character of the god of wine, his novel conception of sculpture in the round, and his extraordinary treatment of the nude body of Christ in both sculpture and painting - but also explores the artist's debt to earlier fifteenth-century imagery and ideas, and supplies substantial new evidence concerning the artist's life and contacts in Rome. Hirst's chapters are followed by Jill Dunkerton's survey of Michelangelo's technique as a painter on panel using both egg tempera and oil paint, based on the investigation of his paintings in the National Gallery. Included in the discussion is Michelangelo's slightly later Doni Tondo in the Uffizi, Florence, his only completed panel painting and one of the most perfect of his works. Dunkerton also looks back to the paintings by Ghirlandaio and his workshop in which Michelangelo was trained. Her text helps us to understand how Michelangelo executed his paintings and also to envisage the startling finished appearance probably conceived by Michelangelo for these familiar but relatively little-studied paintings.

Books like Making & Meaning

Your next favorite book is out there