Michelangelo: Art, Faith, and the High Renaissance

Michelangelo and the High Renaissance

Michelangelo was one of the greatest artists of the High Renaissance. He began his career with the chisel and ended it with the paintbrush. He was a master of sculpture, engineering, and painting. Had he excelled equally in poetry, politics, and arms, he would have been considered a true Renaissance Man — but his focus was always on art. He spent twenty years of his life working on the Sistine Chapel at a time when Europe was undergoing internal religious and political strife that would tear it apart. His painting of the Last Judgment, which depicts Christ's return to Earth to judge the living and the dead, is a work of awe, dread, and hope. Completed in 1541, just as the enormously important Council of Trent (1544–1563) was set to get underway, the Last Judgment represents a world in need of being reminded of Christ's promise that He would return. Through all of his work — but especially through his decades-long labor in the Sistine Chapel — Michelangelo captured the essence of the High Renaissance and foreshadowed the coming age of the Baroque that would accompany the Church's Counter-Reformation period.

The Idealized Human Form

The humanistic influences of the Renaissance were both embraced and advanced by Michelangelo. He depicted a hyper-idealized human form, often nude, as though communicating the pristine, unfallen, innocent, and perfect state that man was meant to have — and would have possessed for all time had he not chosen to disobey God's commandment in the Garden of Eden. Normally the Church would not condone nudity, but the humanism of the Renaissance had ushered in a new fascination with the artworks of the classical period, much of it pagan and a great deal of it featuring nudity. The artists of the Renaissance experimented with naturalism in art, and the politics of Italy at the time were such that Italian leaders were content to see naturalism in art having a provocative effect on the masses, for it distracted the public from the often shady dealings those leaders were conducting, particularly in the area of high finance.

That said, Renaissance artists approached naturalism differently depending on their own styles — but none had a style like Michelangelo. He created images of human beings as though they were supermen, pushing idealization to its furthest extreme. Nonetheless, this idealized expression of the human form can be seen in all of Michelangelo's works, from the Pietà of 1499 to his David of 1504, to the Creation of Adam and the rest of the panels he completed in the Sistine Chapel. These are not forms meant to be realistically accurate in a documentary sense: they are realistic in that every muscle is accounted for and expressed through the movement and position of the limbs, flexed and contorted to show off the body's development. For the Renaissance artists, demonstrating mastery of human anatomy was essential — but for Michelangelo, even that knowledge was not enough. He wanted to reflect the idealized form of man as God intended it. That was Michelangelo's gift to the Renaissance. His religious works — particularly the Last Judgment — were his gift to the coming Baroque.

Sculptor, Painter, and Architect of Rome

Michelangelo benefited Italy by enhancing its beauty and majesty. In 1546, he designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, which still stands today. It was his final commission. He had previously worked under Pope Julius II on the Sistine Chapel. Under Pope Paul III, he would design the very heart of the Vatican, where popes would be laid to rest. He was the architect, artist, conceptualist, designer, and beautician of Rome, serving to enhance its majesty for all the world to see — at a time when the Western world was convulsed over whether it should remain loyal to the Pope and recognize the authority of the Holy See over the Church.

King Henry VIII of England had been an ardent defender of the Catholic faith, but in his pursuit of an annulment from his wife, he broke with the Pope, became head of the Church of England, and ended Rome's ecclesiastical supremacy throughout his kingdom. Europe was quaking all around. Suleiman and the Ottoman forces were advancing from the East, held at bay only by Charles V, who had spent years insisting that the Vatican call a council to address the arguments raised by the growing number of Protestants in his own realm. Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were all pressing forward, each calling for an end to allegiance to the Holy See. Yet here was Michelangelo, in his seventies, designing the defining structure that would come to symbolize Rome's majesty and authority for centuries — St. Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo, who had begun by chiseling the death of Christ out of marble, would end by designing the architecture for the house of dead pontiffs in the very place where the Church would continue to stand, opposed as she was by the Protestants of the Reformation.

Conclusion

Michelangelo was one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance. Vasari considers him to be the greatest, and his body of work is certainly a testament to that view. His sculptures are unparalleled in their beauty and elegance, possessing such exquisite life that one might be forgiven for thinking they were carved by God Himself. Michelangelo had a skill unlike any other artist, living or dead: he lived to create, and the greatest men of his time recognized his abilities and commissioned him to transform Rome and Italy into a place of idealized beauty.