Abstract

Michelangelo's most-used tool was the serrated claw chisel, called the gradina. With this tool, Michelangelo was able to create both grooved and cross-hatched textures on the form as he carefully carved the excess stone. Like the lines and cross-hatchings that he used to create form in his two-dimensional drawings, the grooved textures that Michelangelo carved with his gradina helped define the form of the sculpture that he slowly and skillfully “released” from the stone. Sometimes these textures would later be filed and smoothed away as the work progressed but often, they would remain just as Michelangelo originally created them, as a specifically textured surface.

Michelangelo

Michelangelo created his image as Nicodemus in the evidence. In this sculpture, Nicodemus hands down the body of Christ to the Virgin Mary and to Mary Magdalene. There were a few artists who created portraits of Michelangelo, both during and after his lifetime. One of these artists was Jacopino Del Conte, a Mannerist painter who worked in both Florence and Rome. X-ray examination of this unfinished painting found that Michelangelo's portrait had actually been painted over an earlier blocked in composition of the Holy Family. Michelangelo evidently created three images of himself. He painted his features on the flayed skin held by the figure of St. Bartholomew in The Last Judgment fresco painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. He shaped his own features on the face of the old man who bends beneath the knee of the Victory sculpture, and Florence as well as on the face of old Nicodemus in The Deposition sculpture in the Museo dell' Opera del Duomo in Florence, Italy. Michelangelo believed that each sculpture lived inside a block of stone until it was set free by the artist-sculptor. Here we see some of the tools that Michelangelo used and that are still in use today .

In 1505, Pope Julius II commanded Michelangelo to come to Rome and design a memorial tomb for him. This was a project that would trouble Michelangelo for the next forty years until a smaller version of the tomb to commemorate Julius II was finally finished in1545 for the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. Ironically, Pope Julius II was never buried in this tomb because he died in 1513, long before his memorial tomb was finished.

The details carved into this sculpture are truly amazing: there are realistic skin folds and fingernails on the hands and toes, the strands of hair are arranged realistically, the chiseled patterns indicating the earth, and the many rippling folds of the garments some folds are carved so thinly that the stone is translucent—all add such a sense of reality to this work. Mary's body is larger than life, well-proportioned, and clearly strong enough to hold Christ's weight easily. If she were to stand up, she would be seven feet tall, yet her head is the same size as Christ's. To the viewer, however, none of these inconsistencies are readily apparent; the visual effect is real ...