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    Michelangelo: A Life on Paper
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    Michelangelo: A Life on Paper
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    Michelangelo: A Life on Paper
    Ebook383 pages7 hours

    Michelangelo: A Life on Paper

    By Leonard Barkan

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Michelangelo is best known for great artistic achievements such as the Sistine ceiling, the David, the Pietà, and the dome of St. Peter's. Yet throughout his seventy-five year career, he was engaged in another artistic act that until now has been largely overlooked: he not only filled hundreds of sheets of paper with exquisite drawings, sketches, and doodles, but also, on fully a third of these sheets, composed his own words. Here we can read the artist's marginal notes to his most enduring masterpieces; workaday memos to assistants and pupils; poetry and letters; and achingly personal expressions of ambition and despair surely meant for nobody's eyes but his own. Michelangelo: A Life on Paper is the first book to examine this intriguing interplay of words and images, providing insight into his life and work as never before.

    This sumptuous volume brings together more than two hundred stunning, museum-quality reproductions of Michelangelo's most private papers, many in color. Accompanying them is Leonard Barkan's vivid narrative, which explains the important role the written word played in the artist's monumental public output. What emerges is a wealth of startling juxtapositions: perfectly inscribed sonnets and tantalizing fragments, such as "Have patience, love me, sufficient consolation"; careful notations listing money spent for chickens, oxen, and funeral rites for the artist's father; a beautiful drawing of a Madonna and child next to a mock love poem that begins, "You have a face sweeter than boiled grape juice, and a snail seems to have passed over it." Magnificently illustrated and superbly detailed, this book provides a rare and intimate look at how Michelangelo's artistic genius expressed itself in words as well as pictures.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateDec 12, 2010
    ISBN9780691147666
    Unavailable
    Michelangelo: A Life on Paper
    Author

    Leonard Barkan

    Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton, where he teaches comparative literature, art history, English, and classics. His many books include The Hungry Eye: Eating, Drinking, and the Culture of Europe from Rome to the Renaissance (Princeton, 2021), Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion (Chicago, 2016), Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, 2010), Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (Yale, 1999), which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, Architectural Digest, and Phi Beta Kappa.

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    • 3/5
      This book is beautifully put together and well-printed. It looks at loose drawings of Michaelangelo -- really sheets of sketches, not generally finished work -- and theorizes on the relationship between these sketches and the marginal notes written on the same pieces of paper. In general, it is an interesting idea, and well-researched and presented, but it seems a little thin to hold one's interest over the length of an entire book. More for specialists and academics, I think. It does provide a look at work that you wouldn't see otherwise.