[AfterHours]

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 - 1564)

Best Works:
8.1/10: Pieta (1499) [Sculpture]
8.3/10: David (1504) [Sculpture]
7.3/10: Doni Tondo (circa 1506)
7.5/10: Moses (1515) [Sculpture]
10/10: Sistine Chapel: Ceiling and The Last Judgment (1508 - 1512; 1535 - 1541)
8.3/10: Pauline Chapel: The Conversion of Saul and The Crucifixion of St. Peter (1545; 1550)
7.9/10: Medici Chapel: The Sagrestia Nuova (1555) [Sculpture and Architecture]
7.3/10: The Deposition (1555) [Sculpture] [aka, "Bandini Pietà" or "The Lamentation over the Dead Christ"]
7.3/10: Laurentian Library (Begun 1525, completed posthumously, 1571; Tribune of Elci rotunda added by Pasquale Poccianti in 1841) [Architecture]
8.4/10: St. Peter's Basilica - Principal Architects: Donato Bramante (1503 - 1514); Michelangelo Buonarroti (1546 - 1564); Carlo Maderno (1603 - 1629); Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1629 - 1676) (Building completed and opened 1626; various additions thereafter) [Architecture]
7.3/10: Rondanini Pieta (1564) [Sculpture]

Pieta - Michelangelo Buonarroti (1499) / St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City, Rome, Italy [Sculpture]

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

FRONT VIEW - LARGE: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/..._black.jpg
FRONT VIEW - VERY LARGE: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...399%29.jpg
RIGHT SIDE VIEW - LOW ANGLE: https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/u...ieta-3.jpg
OVERHEAD VIEW: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BljZeFRCYAA...name=small
OVERHEAD VIEW - DETAIL - JESUS' FACE: https://stpetersbasilica.info/Altars/Pi...usface.jpg

Notes of mine that will be used for a future (better detailed and written) analysis:

-The sculpture depicts Mary holding her dead son Jesus in her lap after he has suffered and died upon the cross
-Through stunning technique Michelangelo has managed to imbue the sculpture with immense emotion, tremendous pathos, ex: the dropped head, resigned and fair face of Mary; the limp and sunken Jesus in her lap; the ripple effect and cascading drapery of her clothing.
-However this is only the first layer of its depiction, as Michelangelo manages to sublimate, illuminate and reconcile the mystery and paradox of Jesus and the Virgin Mary through astonishing technique, a miraculous compositional unity, through a profound and deeply moving fusion of multiplied expression and meaning
-Here begins the first unqualified masterpiece of Michelangelo's career, a career that will be marked by an astonishing ability to infuse his works with a singular sense of awe, loaded with ambiguities, multiplied meanings. The sensation he would produce in all his greatest works would later be termed "terribilitia", or "terrifying power".
-Every major component to the work is double, tripled in intent, meaning, expression, profundity.
-The sculpting technique is so advanced as to give Jesus impossibly soft skin (in stone!), so as to give his legs an impossible sense of real "gravity"; you can actually sense the "hanging" sensation of the left, dangling leg; you can actually sense the sunken feeling of the body submerging itself in her lap; you can actually sense the pressure of Mary's right hand pressed against the "soft" skin of Jesus; the pathos and real sense of hanging "gravity" of her left hand giving way. No where else in sculpture is an artist able to imbue (especially relatively "motionless") figures with such distinct and individual life, with an incredible and unmistakable sense of "life energy". Many sculptors would activate figures physically (never more so than in the Mannerist and Baroque movements that Michelangelo influenced so markedly) but few would activate them so "individually" and "emotionally" (so uniquely and distinctly to the personalities and thematic or emotional context), and even fewer still (if any) with such convincing and compelling "gravitas".
-Part of this lies in Michelangelo's ability to coalesce the whole body into a "symphony" of figuration, where each individual gesture or body or appendage position (of a leg, arm, head, torso and so on) is balanced or counter-acted (whether in tension or harmony, or both) by another, so that the figure is a ripple effect of all his or her parts, each leading to the other (in a simultaneity of tension and harmony).
-This is founded in Michelangelo’s amazing acumen with anatomy — not just the structural accuracy of the body of which he was a master — but above this: how life and the energy flow of its successive parts animates the body and from where this starts, each point, how this results, climaxes or releases, and through this, what progression of parts in cause and effect of all the components of the body down to even the smallest muscles and tendons, is effected. And then how the whole figure is effected — not just physically — but emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. He was the greatest composer of the body in the history of art, as he could not just sculpt it into extraordinary physical accuracy but as a “symphonist” went beyond this into a multitude of suggestion and allusion of further meaning, emotional, symbolic, thematic content and otherwise through an astonishingly deep understanding and manipulation of the nuances of its form and composition where every single detail matters, every tendon and part is not just “there” as part of its structure and anatomy, but is imbued with life energy as individually significant and contributing to the whole as a fully composed series of elements from head to toe. From here he managed to not just compose the body into an emotional and spiritual being imbued with gravitas and free will, but then could also manipulate form well beyond the restriction of accuracy. Contrary to reports about his figures being perfect physical specimens (which they rarely were in full) the truth is that many of them are intentionally manipulated to not be so. They are often very accurate in the main or in a key component to give this initial impression to casual observation. They are sculpted with so much conviction and gravitas that what is missed by many viewers is that most of them are yet further manipulated and/or idealized so as to convey something more and greater than this limited view of simply perfect anatomical form (ex: the oft-reported physical perfection of David is in fact quite manipulated in parts beyond this for various technical and symbolic reasons; in painting, many of his figures are intentionally manipulated or exaggerated; several of the Ignudi on the Sistine ceiling are manipulated into impossible poses and positions; The Last Judgment is a monumental, even explosive, manipulation of its calamity of figures and gestures; in the Sagrestia Nuova his sculptures are bending and positioning into impossible, otherworldly poses — bodies forming into poetry and esoteric symbology…).
-The effect and impact of the sculpture between poetry and emotional intensity, or both, is accentuated by the way Michelangelo has fielded and deflected and played with light upon the figure by sculpting certain parts extra deeply (as in the folds of the dress below) and alternated this with more subtle indentations, between rounded figuration and sharper contrasts. Also, the way he has polished it in especially the most prominent and spiritually resonating parts (Jesus' main body, and so on) so that the light reflects heavily and adds larger doses of "divine illumination" where it most dramatically should, and where this is more hidden or subtly evoked on other parts where the polish is lessened or pulled back or more "poetic". The light plays on the sculpture in rather dramatic ways, a highly charged chiaroscuro effect, and it always changes in dramatic emphasis much more so than other sculptures, depending on where it is stationed and how much or how little light is cast upon it.
-The most profound, multiplied emotional content and meanings of the work might begin from the top, with Mary's head and face. In her face we see a serene, resigned female, closed eyes, quietude, solemn. From the crown of her cloak down through the drapery of her clothing there is a tremendous ripple effect of movement all the way down to her waist area. This seems to symbolize the pain and grief that is contradicted (doubled in meaning, both sides of her predicament simultaneously) by the serenity and quiet resignation of her face. This is further expressed by her right hand that holds her son Jesus, pressed hard into his skin, while her left hand is removed and seems to gesture to let him go. She is measured in the spiritual calling and resignation to accept the fate of her son and all that it means, while also experiencing the tremendous grief and pain of a mother who is holding him dead in her lap.
-Furthermore, her face, youthful and untouched by stress or strain, while her bosom on down expands in greater weight and crutch for all the pain being held within not to be extroverted in the face or gesture. This also symbolizes the great pain and suffering of Jesus from the cross he has just descended and in death, and the physical intimacy and connection of this to his body on her lap.
-Further multiplication of expression, of meaning, of ambiguities ensues: Jesus is in a sunken disposition, eyes closed, a dead body at its most emotionally beautiful and rendered, full of humanity, immensely moving (no longer the stiff, the grotesque and startling depictions of the Gothic period). While there he lie apparently dead, he is yet alive. Look more closely and his wounds are more healed than open; his veins are bulging with blood flow and life from his arms, and subtly, his right hand still barely holds the dress below while his left leg and foot is very "light" in the air (not heavy, weighted, hardened, dead) and sculpted precisely so as to render a (very) slight upward impetus towards an awakening. Look yet more closely and his face is not that of the hard stillness and lifelessness in death but in fact is calm and comfortable and in a serene sleep, that of a spiritual being that sleeps peacefully and that pain or threat can not touch. He is right there with Mary, the dream beyond the physical pain.
-This adds another facet to the work where Jesus and Mary are in a profound and loving communion with each other, and that this is a very complete work of art, not just a very emotional piece but miraculously communicating all Christian doctrine simultaneously. For here we have a sunken, “dead” Jesus, sculpturally rendered in devastating emotional conviction, yet also alive and beautiful and serenely untouched. It is miraculous that this is rendered with the absolute perfect balance of ideas and emotions, somehow without upsetting the flow and anatomical accuracy of the physical sculpture — it’s impossible. So also, the drapery of dress on Mary, while conveying the devastated sigh and pain and grief of the crucifixion and her son’s death, yet also is lifting him back up on her right and along with the dualities of his body and facial expression and disposition, the work also conveys thoroughly the Resurrection. Furthermore we have in this the idea that they are both accumulating and absolving all sin for anyone who sees in this and believes, the sin being freed in their faces and consumed in their otherwise expressive and pained bodies or garments below.
-Yet further, one might notice that Mary’s breasts are large, perhaps swollen. They are pressed and undulating beneath the wrinkled cloth, and in the widening of her torso and then lower half of her body, we may have a mother (in part through representation, in part by allusion) in the throes of child birth, while also positioned with Jesus, to be breastfeeding. Here too is Michelangelo sublimated (one must realize that as a sculptor he is forced into the position of being rather intimate with shaping and handling her sculpted body, and this is most evident in the bosom). It was also a common urge in the Renaissance to want to receive the love of Mary, the most pure and beautiful woman, and to want to provide succor to Jesus, experienced vicariously through her. So here too we have Michelangelo’s androgyny whereas Mary is also a surrogate for the sculptor presenting the sculpted/birthed Jesus before us and before God, an additional connotation to the symbolic birth theme here.
-Here too is the idea that we have the marriage, in their communion, of Christ (who is also God the Father) and Mary, both mother and (spiritually) daughter and wife of God, where Christ (as God) caused her pregnancy, the immense feeling brought down through her (alluded to in the downward, increasing sculptural physicality from crown of her head to the eruption of the torso and then legs, seated and splayed) into the birth of Jesus in the flesh. And the composition is also conveying this powerful and apparent contradiction in this immense physical sensation, the spiritual wedding of Mary and Jesus in all their intimacy and communion, both of them in serene, interlocking closeness to each other (in all its harmony and tension, interlocked, reconciled) amidst all their past, present and future; perhaps even in a communal dream (dreamt in the purity and serenity of the faces, above or separate from the tension) in the Heaven of God beyond the life and reality of the pain that has just beset them, or that will beset them or that must beset them.
-There is an unmistakable and almost dangerous sensuality (if not also for the intensity of spiritual devotion, it would be perhaps too "erotically inclined" for the subject), and perhaps here is where the "terrifying power" of Michelangelo first begins its legend. Here we have Michelangelo luminously sculpting, one figure perfectly fused in another, the Bride of Christ and the bridegroom in loving "mystic union" of the sort that poets of the Renaissance lingered on and achingly described, or that Savonarola preached about. In the virtually naked Jesus resting comfortably in her lap, diametrically shared in age with the inexplicable youth of Mary. In the shared beauty and youth of each, in the glistening and softness of the skin, in the perfectly solved figurative puzzle of the two into an intimate congruity, in Jesus nestled into her waist and bosom, in the sensual and elegant folds and intimacy and closeness. In their faces matching in serenity and calm, unharmed, eyes closed, seemingly dreaming, unified, together. In his warm and supple (not hard and dead) legs that are congruous and mirrored in the same of Mary's left hand, also the same energy of Jesus' right hand on her dress, while her right clenches him closer. In the same supple legs that warmly and comfortably (again not hardened, dead, thus emotionally distant) wrap over her thighs splayed, ever so close to an erotic symbol of the period (where in visual art, more often paintings, a woman or man would sit with their leg over the thigh of the other to suggest the erotic, often one or both in the nude).
-This comes full circle to the reconciliation of all facets, time and circumstance. We have a Mary that is physically far larger than Jesus, a grown man, oversized in relation to him. This is on the surface a technical point, a genius solution by the sculptor to balance the composition so as not to have the awkwardness of Jesus being half way off her lap because he would in fact be larger than her, a full grown man. But far more profoundly, Michelangelo has reconciled all facets simultaneously and seamlessly expressed all doctrine through the exact representations that would convey each without denying one or any other, in a single combined figure (both Mary and Jesus and the rock — all of it — are of the same stone). It unites all time between them on Earth, which also the very rock they are sitting on further conveys symbolically. Mary is both the mother that is holding her dead fully grown son after he has died on the cross; she is also the youthful virgin without original sin; also birthing her new born son and child (the size differential and symbolic representation); also Jesus has died; also is resurrected; also both adult male and (in size differential) her child. The composition and incredible sense of reality and convincing emotion and technique are so stunning that they lend conviction to all facets simultaneously in perfect balance and harmony and emotional communion transforming what is fundamentally a physical structure into a truly spiritual experience that manages, as only a God (seemingly or expectedly) could, in reconciling these aspects of doctrine from dichotomies and contradiction into seamless whole. Hence the sculpture is probably the first in history to reach the truly divine and be as if coming directly to us as God’s word, the actual spiritual conveyance behind the seemingly contradictory facts; in other words Michelangelo has managed to understand and show the seemingly impossible in a way that is totally reconciled and does not convey any of the supposed imperfection or inconsistency or illogic that should stand out from it (in fact so seamless and forcefully convincing is the work that these aspects are unlikely to even be noticed unless pointed out).
-The dichotomy of the work (between its contradictory aspects and the yet stunning expressiveness and seamless composition with inexplicable figurative balance) brings about in one a sense of witnessing a miracle permanently in evidence or unfolding before one — an epiphanic point between what really is (physically, in stone) and by the force and conviction of the artist through his work and what is being conveyed, which, incredibly — even once fully aware of it through detailed analysis of its object and composition, and no matter how closely one evaluates, knows of it and attempts to explain it — seems to ineluctably perform a transfiguration of form and content that seems impossible and that cannot seem to be denied (as if summoned through the word and command of God, bending the physical reality), a transcending, beguiling, permanent tension and harmonious coinciding of reality and miracle.

David - Michelangelo Buonarroti (1504) / Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze, Florence, Italy [Sculpture]

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Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

MAIN VIEW - VERY LARGE: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...noised.jpg
DETAIL - HEAD: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...JBU013.jpg
DETAIL - HEAD: https://www.flickr.com/photos/38240758@N06/51188103483/
DETAIL - HEAD: https://twistedsifter.com/wp-content/up...d_09-2.jpg
DETAIL - UPPER BODY - LOW ANGLE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/155903506...666613825/
DETAIL - CHEST/TORSO: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...JBU042.jpg
DETAIL - RIGHT SIDE - LOW ANGLE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/130558987...387836914/
DETAIL - RIGHT HAND: https://www.flickr.com/photos/albyn/50478628263/
DETAIL - RIGHT HAND: https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/imag...20hand.JPG
ALTERNATE VIEW - BACK - LOW ANGLE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bruchez/17602149229/
PHOTO SERIES - SEVERAL ANGLES: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
VIDEO - 360 DEGREE VIEW: https://www.newsflare.com/video/224977/...egree-view
VIDEO - HIGH QUALITY VIEWS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z42qh2FKau4
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, Italy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nanpalmero/51351266306/
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, Italy: http://www.mysunnylittlecorner.com/uplo...642244.png
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, Italy: https://www.cntraveler.com/gallery/best...n-florence
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, Italy: https://external-preview.redd.it/jCV1sO...d6ab8fe670
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, Italy: https://corrierefiorentino.corriere.it/...2104141958

-17 feet tall, impossibly sculpted from an “unusable” block where there was no room for error and the size of the figure barely could be composed inside the dimensions of the block, a task that probably no one else in history could’ve produced under the same circumstances let alone with more favorable ones. The pedestal it stands on is an additional 7.5 feet making the overall height 24.5 feet tall.
-As the usual with Michelangelo’s masterpieces, the final work is breathtaking and the interpretation and profundity is deeply felt, multi-faceted, ambiguous
-The sculpture, taking on the massive block and impossible task with no room for error, was itself (Michelangelo vs the gigantic block) a metaphor for David and Goliath
-Michelangelo expresses this in the work itself, as he compares his work and sculpting tool with David and his sling “Me with my bow, David with his sling”
-From the base, there is a part of the work that is almost never mentioned, yet among the keys to the depth of its meaning. The stump behind David’s leg is not just a technical point to support the weight of the statue, but is from a laurel tree which symbolizes victory and fame (also used to create laurel garlands which David’s hair further evokes). It has double meaning though: it is also the symbol of the Medici and the stump is that of a dead tree. In 1494, Lorenzo Medici, Michelangelo’s father figure, patron and mentor, had died. The laurel tree is dead yet is continued by the leg of David which holds the imposing figure in its stance. It is a symbol of Michelangelo’s growth into a man and into his own person and Humanist following the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent and a tribute to one of his sources of inspiration as a Humanist
-The figure has, on the face, Michelangelo’s nose, before it was broken in his youth, which ruined his face and which he was self conscious of and he felt made him ugly in the eyes of God. The beauty of his David symbolizes Michelangelo’s yearning to be ideal in the eyes of God, the body and perfection and beauty he wished he had (something he would continue to express and feel further and further conflict about with and in his art as he got older).
-Technically, the figure is an astonishing and exemplary model of the classical nude far surpassing antiquity in the mastery of every detail, in the skin tone, in the balance and tone of the muscles, in the elegance and contour of the body, in the veins and minute details from head to toe
-Michelangelo altered the size of the hands, enlarging them, and the size of the head, enlarging it, to (apparently) meet the perspective from below where David was planning to be stationed (high above on the Duomo). This means that, from below these key points (head and hands) would look accurately from below. However, as there is enough evidence to suggest, as an engineer and otherwise, that Michelangelo was also giving consideration to the likelihood this elevated position would not be carried out, not to mention the immaculate detail afforded the figure which was obviously meant to be viewed up close, there are other, far more meaningful reasons as well, regardless of how impressive such a perspective oriented achievement would have been
-Michelangelo is expressing himself as a Humanist, not as in the intense spiritual devotion, the titanic emotional intensity of the Pieta, bending powerful emotive forces and themes like grief, sensuality, violence, death, spirituality the resurrection, the devotion, and so on. In the case of the David, it is not about expressing the “emotional” as much as it is in the “thought” the “concept”, the “intellect”, the “consciousness” as a separate factor, will or determinism.
-Amazingly, and almost unbelievably, David manages to tell its story without any primary evidence or descriptive elements from Michelangelo, amounting to a supreme genius of Michelangelo’s sculpted art, the meaning exuded from a single figure and that of its extraordinary allusionary ability. Thought, not action. Intellect, not violence.
-In the gargantuan size and body of David, alludes and abstracts also the physical stature and facing of Goliath. In the overwhelming presence and power and imposing nature, we are abstracting the Goliath as being met, solved, defeated, rectified by the spirit, by thought and intellect (the body is simultaneously huge and imposing and intimidating, a deity in one’s presence, while miraculously due to the subtlety of its technique is also never a monstrousity or grotesque (despite also its stark nudity, another source of technical dichotomy and amazement) due to its harmony, sense of intellect, thought, serenity; this is an amazing fusion of these extremes, dialectical as both competing or tense and fused or harmonious concepts in every part of the structure.
-In the enlarged head of David we are also reflecting, abstracting, the fearsome and huge head of Goliath, and in this way Michelangelo shows, literally and conceptually, David facing him.
-In the huge and oversized hands we have Goliath’s massive and monstrous strength abstracted and mitigated and solved through the intellectual, spiritual, Humanistic side of his David.
-In David’s weapon we even have this hidden from view, wrapped over his body to be hidden in his closed hand. There are arguments such as posed by Irving Lavin, that this in fact represents a scroll and that Michelangelo is hiding, abstracting this, through the supposition that it would be his sling that he used to kill Goliath, adding a further spiritual and philosophical interpretation.
-In David’s positioning we have the elegant and flawless idealization of contraposto, which is ambiguously tied between the tenseness of leaning back on the back leg and the tendency towards confidence and forward motion of his back, and in this is abstracted, alluded to, the entering of battle (striding forward into it), the tenseness of its threat, and the returning from battle, securing and finalizing one’s step, conclusion. And here both David and Goliath, the cycle of the battle, are also abstracted, alluded to, “sculpted thought” and abstraction of ideas, emotions, concepts.
-In his neck we have both the elegant posture into an upward, regal stance, while we also have the tenseness of apprehension, fear, the threat, the violence. And here too we have both David and Goliath, the battle, abstracted contained and solved and worked out in intellect, thought, a measurement of character.
-Furthermore, David’s size, what’s accentuated in regards appendage and the insinuation of form or of impetus, and of dimension, bends markedly in relation to the viewers position, perspective in relation to him, through visual tricks brought about by the size of the figure, its three dimensionality in the round and in relation to its scale versus the size of a human being, and the angles of perspective (because of said scale) this forces the viewer into. And of course, staggeringly, this scales the viewer up to both sides of the equation, fused in tension and harmonious collaboration with each other, abstracting the competing concepts and themes, story, of David and Goliath as a constant. This is also a major factor in the speechless impression the sculpture tends to have on people in real life and that they feel but can’t easily articulate or explain (and why it’s so different in impact than other merely large statues; the effect on one being almost inexplicable, as if the statue is actually alive and impinging its presence and thought upon one, altering, morphing, in alignment to one’s position, movement and perspective — it is utterly astounding).
-So when approaching from some distance David looks as a young man or teen who has yet to fill adulthood in that the hands and head standout as being too large (almost but never quite awkward, just barely subdued by the exact rightness of Michelangelos technical, anatomical mastery and the harmonious craft of the body granting it “Gods serenity, calm, divine illumination”) and as one approaches, the scale of these “aligns” more and more closely to its body as if he is growing into a man and more opposing figure. This is not merely the obvious facet of a figures dimension, scale, changing as one draws near to it, but that the figure actually appears to morph, the differentiatial of its parts converging differently in relation to each other, into another age, power, disposition, imposing stature, adulthood, as one nears. This is the story of David abstracted, bent by the will of God to grant him the intellect to be of stature to defeat Goliath.
-This is also, as we stand from a distance, we are representative of David in both the distance we are sizing up the statue from (as David too sized up Goliath) we see David as more youthful (as in the story when he confronted Goliath, a youth), and as we get closer, David becomes (at least in part) "more Goliath", just as we (and he) are progressing in having to confront the Giant -- the statue also appears to grow or morph into a more imposing, physically matured, intimidating figure, its mighty fists and large head an increasingly imposing impingement upon our space (three dimensionally pressing "down" into it) as we arrive near, and bending, piercing, the space or sense of dimension as we are near and making our way around it. It is abstracting, alluding, morphing into both facets (David growing into his own man, arising to the strength needed for victory, through thought, God's will, spiritually endowed) simultaneously "richocheting" off each other, the thought "echoed" that bends his will, Humanist, into the ability to do so.
-As well, David’s face: from a high angle, which would be that of Goliath’s, David’s look is intimidating and very imposing, very challenging, embattled (abstracting David and Goliath, in fusion, and in cause and effect). From an angle to the right of it (it’s left) he appears in fear and apprehension. From a lower angle to the left of it, his face appears confident, calm,
-David’s eyes are deviated, piercing, looking in slightly different directions. As well, a person cannot also see both of them at the same time except by looking at him directly (currently this view is mostly blocked by a column in the museum). This means, however that his disposition, his countenance, his thoughts/emotions change from every angle one views of him and also, through a trick of the eye and how Michelangelo has carved the eyes to play and deflect light off of them, appears to follow the viewer all around him as long as the face, or at least an eye, can be seen. This also is an additional technical element that helps account for the extraordinary visual tricks and power the statue seems to have in relation to the viewer and their position; it seems to eye and guide the relay, the action.
-Michelangelo uses sculpture to "sculpt" not just a very physical, and here exceptionally large figure, in stone but actually seems to imbue and extract from it life, consciousness, a point of view, concepts, ideas, that are both reflected or alluded to in the sculpture that also from itself seems to have the power to give and interact with life surrounding it, and through seemingly bending space and progressing through time.
-"Symphony of figuration" head to torque to toe ... explain
-The body as "metronome/clock" ... explain
-In keeping with the Rennaissance, David is also representative of Pagan, Greek figures before, multifaceted symbol of Religion and Antiquity fused... explain
-"The Contemplative Life" erecting through abstraction "The Active Life" ... explain
-Symbol of Florentine political scene, Resistance ... explain
-Nudity as in the eyes of God and that the victory is from within (not based on weapons, anything else) ... explain

TO BE CONTINUED…

Doni Tondo - Michelangelo Buonarroti (circa 1506)

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FULL VIEW - LARGE: https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/holy-...&pid=1
FULL VIEW - VERY LARGE - ZOOM FUNCTION: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset...JCwg?hl=en
FULL VIEW - LARGEST IMAGE - HIGHEST RESOLUTION AND QUALITY - ZOOM FUNCTION: https://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/vie...buonarroti
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy: https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload...4x684.jpeg

-Michelangelo envisions through tripled composition of pictorial planes (background, middle ground, fore ground; each a separate time and “painting” fused into a single inter-related whole conceptually and in “moving” time, in omnipresence of time and action under the will and foretold sacred history, present and future of God), back to the front and exerting out of the picture frame, a simultaneity of multiple times and planes of existence, profoundly inter-related in a “montage” from two to three dimensions and outwards into Reality
-Radical apocalyptic tremors, envisioned through the foreboding influence of Savonarola (who would be burned at the stake, haunting and influencing Michelangelo until the end of his life), foretell the End of the World through the Doni Tondo, symbolism rendering far more than a wedding gift featuring the Holy Family as is too easily presupposed (its surface reading; as always, no matter the genesis of a commission, Michelangelo never rests to impose his own unflinching work ethic, artistic integrity and staggeringly profound ideas and vision and emotional conviction upon his works in order to never fail to honor Him)
-Joseph cupping his legs around Mary is almost scandalous, as she is a Virgin and this is almost an erotic symbol, and is probably intended to alluded to the husband and wife and the birth of the child but also without the actual sexual act (just metaphorically so, spritiually conceived, alluded to here physically as in an interconnected symbology of the figures, interlocked)
-Directionality of Christ, and of the action -- is the Virgin Mary passing him up to Joseph or is he passing Christ to her -- is decidedly ambiguous
-Joseph above Christ and Mary, a metaphor for God the father (Joseph a physical symbol of Him) and down through Christ in the flesh to Mary who gave him birth
-Christ, as he is being passed/held, crowns Mary's head blessing her
-Background is populated by five nude youths in clamorous discourse, ignorant of the scene in the foreground
-In front of them is John the Baptist, turned away from them and looking out of his scene to the figure of Christ and the symbolic action of the sacred family, the direction of his vision/perspective
-John is approaching the scene just behind a stone wall separating him from the sacred family
-The nude youths in the background stand in front of what appears to be a marble, intercut, wall. One of them is actually clothed (far left) with a nude youth leaned against and virtually between his legs.
-In the far background is untouched land and mountains, a near misted dream (not dissimilar to Leonardo's aerial perspectives, almost water color in depiction)
-As in Tolnay's interpretation, the middle ground occupied by the nudes represent the world ante legem (before the law) prior to Moses’ reception of the
Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. In the foreground, the figures of Joseph and Mary thus embody the world sub lege (under the law), between the dispensation of the law to Moses and the Incarnation of Christ. Christ, as de Tolnay proposes, thus embodies the world sub gratia (under grace), where the Incarnation of the Word ushers in the New Covenant.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Moses - Michelangelo Buonarroti (1515) [Sculpture]

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FULL MAIN VIEW - LARGE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ryanhadle...otostream/
FULL MAIN VIEW - VERY LARGE: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...JBU160.jpg
UPPER BODY - VERY LARGE: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...JBU190.jpg
ANGLED VIEW - VIEWER'S RIGHT - LARGE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dese/48567949391/
ANGLED VIEW - VIEWER's RIGHT: https://www.flickr.com/photos/92275331@N07/33717719098/
ANGLED VIEW - VIEWER's RIGHT - UPPER BODY - VERY LARGE: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...Detail.jpg
ANGLED VIEW - VIEWER's LEFT: https://www.flickr.com/photos/16914951@N03/25434855961/
ANGLED VIEW - VIEWER's LEFT: https://www.flickr.com/photos/70125105@N06/35605022926/
DETAIL - VIEWER'S LEFT SIDE: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...JBU350.jpg
DETAIL - UPPER BODY: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ryanhadley/48031463146
DETAIL - UPPER BODY: https://www.flickr.com/photos/robmenting/15560954066/
DETAIL - FACE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/paullew/5573931334/
IMAGE FOR SCALE - San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, Italy:

Sistine Chapel: Ceiling and The Last Judgment - Michelangelo Buonarroti (1508 - 1512; 1535 - 1541) / Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, Rome, Italy

Ceiling - FULL VIEW:

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Ceiling - RIGHT SIDE - NEAREST THE ENTRANCE:

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Ceiling - LEFT SIDE - NEAREST THE LAST JUDGMENT:

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Altar Wall - The Last Judgment:

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NOTE: None of the images truly do the work justice, except for the Virtual Tours and Video footage. The Virtual Tour is based on very HQ photography and approaches an ideal presentation of Michelangelo's work in part because it is truest to the actual lighting conditions with which the artist produced it, aligning best to the coloration, tones and various technical choices Michelangelo made. The video footage provided is still very HQ and is "live" so tends to give the closest example of actually visiting the Chapel today. However, it should be noted that it yet doesn't quite present the work under as accurate conditions (relative to Michelangelo's technical choices) as the virtual tour, because so much new lighting has been added in more recent years, making portions of it (especially the Last Judgment) that weren't intended to be so bright, where Michelangelo specifically made use of the lighting of the Chapel with particular regard to the form of his composition and placement of figures. The other images provided are helpful for a general acclimation to the work, for thematic study, in learning the progression of imagery, but should not be used to evaluate the full quality and emotional sensation of Michelangelo's painting and artistry. The Last Judgment, especially on the internet, tends to be poorly photographed much too often as it is probably impossible to capture in a single, balanced shot at closer distances (so often has the mediocre inconsistency of quality that seem attributable to a "collage" of connected photos, however seamlessly presented), and in the process almost always loses some grandeur and expressivity of its figurative modelling, some of its polish/finish and proper color, and above all, the sheer magnitude, force and sense of weight that is brought upon the painted space (rising and collapsing) and "outwards" by the figurative momentum, its foreshortening or "three-dimensionality". I recommend very HQ, large scale Art books, specifically dedicated to this work, for any detailed, up close analysis and thorough evaluation of the individual figures/imagery. I recommend the Virtual Tour for when taking a step back to evaluate the work in larger sections.

VIRTUAL TOUR - PANORAMIC FULL VIEW: http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/...ina_en.htm
VIDEO - INSIDE THE VATICAN - CEILING & THE LAST JUDGMENT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kywzKENX8n4
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxn0KbFTtU8
FULL VIEW - 360 DEGREE PANORAMA: https://www.360cities.net/image/sistine...ity-rome-2
FULL VIEW - 360 DEGREE PANORAMA: https://www.360cities.net/image/the-sistine-chapel
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, Italy: https://www.italyperfect.com/blog/wp-co...-Crowd.jpg
CEILING - PICTORIAL SCHEME: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...posite.png
CEILING & THE LAST JUDGMENT - DETAIL - ALL WORKS - INCLUDING HISTORY & THEMES (Mediocre Picture Quality): http://www.wga.hu/tours/sistina/index_c.html

INCOMPLETE ANALYSIS - NOTES/OUTLINE/ROUGH DRAFT:

-The decorative program of the Sistine Chapel encapsulates the history of salvation. It begins with God's creation of the world and his covenant with the people of Israel (represented in the Old Testament scenes on the ceiling and south wall), and continued with the earthly life of Christ (on the north wall). The addition of the Last Judgment completed the narrative. (Khan Academy)
-Michelangelo's Ceiling and Last Judgment are a visionary synthesis of painting, sculpture, architecture and poetry, all brought into three-dimensional fruition entirely through two-dimensional painted fresco

__________

Initially, Pope Julius II wanted Michelangelo to paint the twelve apostles. According to Ross King, in his book Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, Michelangelo wanted to continue to do more with the human form:

“[The Pope] gave [Michelangelo] instructions to paint the Twelve Apostles… Michelangelo was clearly still not satisfied with his efforts. His main problem with the proposed scheme was that, apart from the Twelve Apostles, there was very little scope for him to explore his interest in the human form.” (King 58, 59).

The human form presented the unparalleled potential to express the divine. Michelangelo, with an interest in exploring the full scope of the human being’s relationship with the divine, became more and more ambitious with his design for the Sistine Ceiling. There was a problem, however: anyone who created anything for the Sistine Chapel would have needed their designs approved by the Pope’s official theologian.

Michelangelo decided to discuss these matters with the pope himself. King states: “Audaciously outspoken as ever, [Michelangelo] complained that the design proposed by His Holiness would prove a cosa povera (poor thing). Julius appears, for once, to have acquiesced without much argument. He merely shrugged his shoulders and then, according to Michelangelo, gave him free rein to design his own program. ‘He gave me a new commission.’ the artist later wrote, ‘to do what I liked.’” (King 60).

During our interview, Dr. Wallace told me:

“This is the great question that no one has been able to resolve in 500 years: to what degree did Michelangelo have freedom, and how much was he told to do? I think it did start out [with] the Pope [saying], “Okay, let’s do twelve apostles.” Our early drawings show that Michelangelo was… thinking a much simpler design [with] more geometry and a few figures… Once he got started, he became more ambitious, and this is… typical of Michelangelo. Once he starts and reconciles himself to a project, he tends to increase the ambition. And so at what point did the design become much more complicated? We don’t know exactly… I think… Michelangelo comes to [the pope] and says, “I think we can do something more spectacular,” and the pope’s going to say, “Yes, go ahead, do it.” I don’t think Michelangelo was being told what to do.”

All evidence seems to point to Michelangelo having the freedom to create the design he wanted. He wanted to explore the expressive divinity of the human form. He completely transformed the pope’s initial desire for twelve apostles into “[o]ne of the largest assemblies of images ever planned… [which] would ultimately involve more than 150 separate pictorial units and include more than three hundred individual figures.” (King 65).

What changes did Michelangelo make? What were his ambitious ideas for the Sistine Chapel? According to King, “[T]he apostles were replaced… by seven prophets from the Old Testament and five sibyls from Pagan mythology. Above these figures, in the rectangular panels running along the spine of the vault, would be nine episodes from the Book of Genesis. The spandrels and lunettes, meanwhile, would feature portraits of the ancestors of Christ — a rather uncommon subject — and the pendentives four more scenes from the Old Testament” (King 64).

I asked Dr. Wallace, “Why did Michelangelo make these changes? For instance, why did he include the five sibyls from pagan mythology in a Christian Chapel?”

Dr. Wallace responded:

“The Sistine is… not just nine stories of Genesis… It’s the whole cornucopia of creation. It’s everything. It’s not a separation between Christianity and paganism. It’s God’s creation [, and] he created pagan antiquity before he created Christianity… He created the world. The sibyls are the counterpart to the prophets: they are the pagan world before Christianity came. So in the same way we have pagan sibyls [on the Sistine], we also have Jewish stories on the Sistine. The Sistine is not Christian, Jewish, [or] pagan, it’s all of creation.”

——————

-Ceiling 1512, Last Judgment on the altar wall, 1541
-Overall, combined, an astounding expression of the omniscience of time and action, the juxtaposition of the omniscience and ineluctability of Gods plan with the humanist revolution of free will, thought, action. A reconciliation of both.
-One of the first points to recognize, rarely stressed or pointed out (especially relative to its importance), is that the entire work is LIFE SIZED or larger. Even the smaller figures are actually life sized, as large as a grown person. The larger ones such as the prophets and sibyls, are massive — as large as his David in fact. This is the first clue that Michelangelo is including the viewer completely in the work. He is expressing this as a reality in the here and now, something the viewer is being included in as a matter of fact, as a confrontation with his own fate, as a pressing question and reality.
-The second point as regards including the viewer into a full immersion and protagonist that must reckon with the work him or herself is the three dimensional
-in other words, Michelangelo has advanced the spatial inclusion three dimensionality of Massacio’s Holy Trinity and Leonardo’s Last Supper into a vastly more panoramic composition that accounts for the entire space and, believe it or not, aligns compostionally to all vantage points within both itself (it’s own figures within its story and trajectory and compositional plan) and the position of the viewer.

TO BE CONTINUED... JUST SOME BASIC NOTES... ANY WRITTEN THOROUGH ANALYSIS OF THIS WORK WOULD BE A MASSIVE UNDERTAKING...

Pauline Chapel: The Conversion of Saul and The Crucifixion of St. Peter - Michelangelo Buonarroti (1545; 1550)

THE CONVERSION OF SAUL:

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THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER:

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FULL VIEW - PAULINE CHAPEL - VIRTUAL TOUR: https://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle...ina_en.htm
FULL VIEW - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL - MEDIUM: https://media.vaticannews.va/media/cont...0.844.jpeg
FULL VIEW - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL - MEDIUM: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_01.jpg
FULL VIEW - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL - LARGE: https://media.patronsvaticanmuseums.org...9dc6f.jpeg
FULL VIEW - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL - VERY LARGE: https://media.patronsvaticanmuseums.org...9dc6f.jpeg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_03.jpg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_04.jpg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_05.jpg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_06.jpg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_07.jpg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_08.jpg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...10%2C1.jpg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://media.patronsvaticanmuseums.org...9dc6f.jpeg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...avallo.jpg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_13.jpg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://media.patronsvaticanmuseums.org...9dc6f.jpeg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_14.jpg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_15.jpg
DETAIL - THE CONVERSION OF SAUL: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_17.jpg
FULL VIEW - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER - MEDIUM: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_02.jpg
FULL VIEW - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER - VERY LARGE: https://media.patronsvaticanmuseums.org...9dc6f.jpeg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://media.patronsvaticanmuseums.org...9dc6f.jpeg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_06.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_03.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_04.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_07.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_08.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_09.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_10.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_11.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_13.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_12.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_16.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_17.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://media.patronsvaticanmuseums.org...9dc6f.jpeg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_14.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...%2C_15.jpg
DETAIL - THE CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER: https://media.patronsvaticanmuseums.org...9dc6f.jpeg
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Pauline Chapel, Vatican City, Italy: https://www.kofc.org/assets/images/down...chapel.jpg
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Pauline Chapel, Vatican City, Italy: https://catholicphilly.com/media-files/...RTHDAY.jpg
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Pauline Chapel, Vatican City, Italy: https://www.acistampa.com/image/2cp_149....jpg?w=810

My notes (pretty thorough, still needs to be edited, polished, better organized…)

The Conversion of Saul:
-Saul on road to Damascus, a persecutor of Christians, gets temporarily blinded and enlightened by the arrival/vision and command of Jesus, stunned and thereafter converted:

As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"

"Who are you, Lord?" Saul asked.

"I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," he replied. "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do."

The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. Paul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything.

— Acts 9:3–9, NIV

-The erupted composition, startled and perplexed into confusion and ambiguous movement, the visionary and the colorful fantasy and this verging on discord (but, subtly, never quite, as if transfixed by a paralysis of color and composition, by the will of God, stopping it just short of being so; struck with logic and meaning and alignment just short of confusion, the moment before disaster and all meaning, epiphany would be missed and lost)
-Colors and lighting are as if under the fluctuation of the visio sense, oscillation of near expressionist and dynamic color and dancing light across the figures, across the landscape, across the sky. There is an omnipresence of dynamic color, of visual obfuscation. The lighting is largely ecliptic but also a near discord of colorful variety
-It is under the visio and fantasy of the blind, dumbstruck into pain, shock and the heavenly glance that has colored his vision (a vision that combines pain and confusion and heavenly fantasy and beauty)
-Saul has been thrown from his horse. Jesus has struck him and he, and all the men around him are startled, confused in disarray, some covering their ears to the sudden shock of the sound. Groups of them part in waves, across the fresco and outwards. The horse startled, takes up the center of the composition and all the grounded bodies seem to splay from this center, a symbol of the follies of man (not just Saul being thrown from the horse, but this symbol is expanded to all even if most directly upon Saul). Saul is a surrogate for the artist himself, Michelangelo, bearing his face and age at this time (Saul was reported to be around 30 when this would have occurred).
-The lack of a landscape, its relative barrenness and dream like quality, reflects Michelangelo's extreme spiritualization, a retreat from reality into the host of another spiritualized world, his art attaining an extra-transcendental quality as it exists in a world where only that which it is, in essence only, remains (and not extranneous 'scenery' or unneeded 'props' or elements to the environment that would increase the realism; this is a supernatural or transcendental art in its own transcendental vision or world).
-The work is populated by bodies that are composed so that they appear both moving in a variety of directions, starts or reactions yet “frozen in time”, inert, heavy, burdened, trapped in space, overcome or struck by a determination not their own (the will and command of Jesus, God). Even those leaping or running seem yet compressed for freedom inside their own 'sculpted' space (as if 'sculpted out of the "rock" of the space that they reside, and captured only there, regardless of the spur or flurry of their movement), as if their movement is but inside a thickness or an illusory space, or a space entirely their own among the whole, and not a real space with much dimensional expanse at all. It is extraordinary that Michelangelo can produce such an effect through the art of how he 'sculpts', shapes and paints the body, its outlines and inner lines, its musculature and in the coalescing of its variety of parts into an animate whole. He can alter, however subtly or expressively, the emotional content, the endowment of life, the meaning of a figure, more dramatically or nuanced, more profoundly and meaningfully than any artist in history.
-Jesus is suspended in the sky in the upper left, foreshortened towards the exterior of the painting and virtually upside down, striking a bolt of light upon Saul. He and his accompanying angels are painted in ethereal, "light-weight" and dream like colors, soft textures and tones, not hardened, burdened, trapped in space, stiff, like those below.
-Saul is the only one in the painting who can see, eyes closed, the internal vision of his only, and suddenly shocked and devastated, comprehends what he is looking at. And this vision is the painting we see and are given privy to behold. In the distant right side is Damascus if we are literal, but it is instead a new vision of Jerusalem replacing it if we keep in mind the symbolic resonance and epiphanic, visionary nature of the painting, and probably even triples as an allusion to the old St. Peter's Basilica.
-All figures are "frozen" still into symbolic figuration whereas their positions, inclinations, suddenly and all at the exact moment and only this moment "mean" the vision and message being brought to Saul by Jesus (like each body its own piece of dialect in a set of hieroglyphics).
-Saul, and from the line of light of Jesus that then bends through him, follows the of action and points to Damascus/Jerusalem/Old St. Peter's in this distance, is composed into the shape of the bishop's staff as he is now destined to be a one, overseeing people, as in a shepherd.
-Saul's body position and legs point to a parallel figure "replying" and across to him at the right of the painting in the same form (underneath the large, startled man's legs with covered ears). Each suddenly take the metaphorical meaning and position of River Gods (as in those same stone figures Michelangelo intended for the floor of the Sagrestia Nuova), lining the way Saul must lead now (pointing to the city vision), echoing the sacrifice taking place (and drawing a parallel of Jesus' sacrifice), and as witnesses to Saul's newfound oath and an allusion to his pending conversion to Paul and to Christianity, heretofore persecuted.
-Just below and to the right of Saul, the recently deceased Cecchino Bracci (close and dear to Michelangelo in real life, died in 1545 while this work was being painted) emerges from the real space of the Chapel into the supernatural reality of the painted space right in time to be included in Saul's heavenly vision, struck down to him under the powerful and loving Grace of God (no matter the sin, even as persecutor, you can be forgiven and converted). Here in the supernatural reality of Michelangelo's transcendental art is a space where beings exist and live forever for all posterity. It is no accident that Bracci is painted as if fantasy, from a slumber emerging and arriving to a dream.

Here between both paintings, Michelangelo illuminates, conceptually combines each of the frescoes (The Conversion of Saul in dialectic with The Crucifixion of St. Peter, vice versa, to and fro) unto the other, directly parallel and lateral to each other as almost mirrors but yet virtual opposites, through an extraordinary "thematic asymmetry", wherein each is stylistically, visually, compositionally 'opposed', yet in communicative, reflective relay, profound juxtaposition and counterpoint with each other. Artistically, this can be seen as a daring, even shocking, culmination or final improvisation following the miraculous geometric, compositional, expressive, thematic and conceptual correlation he had previously performed with the Last Judgment, as an extension of and in posing lines and relationships that are ingeniously tied back to and a development from his Sistine Ceiling, despite a gap of 3 decades between them, despite the latter development in style, and the extreme unlikelihood that such was originally planned beforehand (through perhaps dreamt during intervening years?) and therefore had to be improvised through astounding compositional genius. Here in the adjacent Pauline Chapel, following such a supreme masterpiece that was the Sistine, a not entirely dissimilar (though still very much its own) "improvisation" is taken to an unexpected and newly revised culmination of his painting career, Michelangelo ever so inward and thinking well beyond his contemporaries that (outside of maybe a select few in the know, perhaps later Caravaggio among them in his own re-working of the same thematic duo) his work here would not start being more fully grasped for centuries due to a relatively complete understanding of The Sistine being a much advised prerequisite (of which this is still being intellectually wrestled with) and then due to its hyper modern and psychological implications that were well beyond the depth, daring and scope of other Renaissance artists (revised understanding, after centuries devaluing it or of obscurity, for this work as yet actually another stunning testament to his genius, perhaps begins with Steinberg, serviced by Wallace if some of his points may be flawed, and than capped by Carloni; each of these successively serving to destroy the ridiculous notion that Michelangelo must've spent 8 long and grueling years meticulously composing and painting an "uninspired failure". This despite long standing knowledge that his art was extremely dear to him, his discipline to mastery and total immersion in such beyond reproach, and his belief that his work was at the service of God and amounted to his route to Grace, falls flat in the misunderstanding or embellishment that he of all artists would even consider sabatoging this in his work for the Pope of all people and in his Chapel)

Michelangelo takes the basis of each story, captures them but also improvises upon them turning them into harbingers and epiphanies upon and of and in relay with each other. Each fresco is, individually and combined, an act or juxtaposition of the heterenomy of their religious texts, acted upon by Michelangelo’s humanism (his own free will), an improvisation even bold alteration of them in relation to his own concerns and that of the historical period he found himself in (upon and in argument with the Church and the Biblical reportages he is depicting, but in sacrificial and humanist and individual devotion to Christ and what he views as his subjectively interpreted and received meaning of God in moral relationship to his life and period under scrutiny).

A fundamental relay point between the two is that of the “visible” (in the Crucifixion of St Peter, the martyrs eyes wide open and staring back at the other) challenging the “invisible” (in Saul, eyes closed, enraptured and in pain to the vision commanded through Jesus, but yet facing across, laterally, in parallel to Peter, both martyrs also surrogates of Michelangelo himself).

Herein, each fresco individually and combined, becomes Michelangelo’s personal struggle with his own historical singularity, the feeling he is alone amongst all, having been labeled and only known as Il Divino above all the rest, outliving all, a certain sadness and lonesome questioning of merit inside such overwhelming recognition, his individualism from the past and from his time, his fight for a wholly unique art in and amongst the rigid doctrine and history he is being ask to report (in paint, in consecration, inside the Pope’s chapel) and in newly questioning his own aesthetic effectiveness of the route he has taken in his art to honor and reach out to the divine. Prior to this, Michelangelo attempted to reach God or the divine through the spiritual resonance and conviction of his works, but here this is shattered, questioned, doubted, and in himself he sees Saul, looked back upon and denounced by Peter, in a fusion of Platonic (and humanistic) quandary of how to serve his faith, a questioning of his art and a wincing fight or struggle to make his own. Here he destroys the very art he himself erected in the neighboring Sistine and wipes the slate clear in formal and aesthetic devastation, questioning himself back and forth in sacrificial pain and without respite, nearing resignation and an irresolute oblivion without a net to catch himself (like finding what you believed is no longer there to offer comfort or a promise of salvation).

In the Conversion of Saul, he performs a virtual death of Mannerism stretching the unusual size and poses of its bodies through the exaggeration of movement into a burdened, heavy entrapment and entranced stillness. Ending their infinite free will into forced torsions and trapped movement that seems sculpted inside a separately dominated and commanded space that has removed self-determinism (at a glance) but is actually a struggle to wrestle itself through its grip to a new autonomy.

In the Crucifixion of St Peter, he destroys the Rennaissance laws of proportion and the beauty (of his own bodies from, above all, the Sistine Ceiling) in an emotionally restless act of abandon to gloom and ugliness and of bodies resigned and heavy with doubt and burden, dispirited of divine illumination (compare its figures to the heavenly glow that shines the bodies, that plays and glistens and changes color with the light, of the Doni Tondo, the Sistine Ceiling and Last Judgment).

Incredibly, Saul’s moral devastation is drawn from not just the vision of his own work, but actually envisioned through Peter’s ordeal, and vice versa (further explained below) and in this, these works become increasingly profound and collectively stun for their ingenuity and “hidden” emotional power that are privy to the “initiated” that, like Saul alone but now represented in the artist himself through the collective epiphany of the two martyrs, “once were blind but can now see”.

The Crucifixion of St Peter:
-Centered around the placing of Peter onto the cross while a crowd arrives and/or gathers around him, and while others perform the arrangement of the execution
-Peter himself volunteered to be crucified upside down so as not to mimic Jesus. In the original painting before minor alterations, Peter was in fact totally nude and positioned upon the cross without nails. Though perhaps thought of as a "mistake" by Michelangelo, hence the correction, this was to illustrate how voluntary it was (that he was positioned on the cross on his own, without being forcibly nailed into crucifixion as of yet). His nudity was to illustrate his vulnerability and the returned state he expected to find himself in upon body death (all men being nude in the eyes of God) further illustrating his conviction and the sense of destiny.
-The light is again ecliptic though this time not blanketed by darkness and more quiet and ominous (under some darkened clouds) -- not so fantastically expressive
-The people in the painting, surrounding Peter, starting from the lower left, move upwards, across the top of the landscape and back down on the right, to the exterior of the painting and (with the final women at the bottom) back into the Chapel or the present reality (or to at least connect it with the viewer that this is an event we are tied to and considering in the here and now). And this is the movement and composition of the painting, Peter and the cross acting as its central axis that its perimeter revolutions turn by and are in dialect with
-Starting from the lower left, Michelangelo's art is preoccupied with death and the aging process. His disegno has reached a point of nearly becoming a "scalpel" (drawing from his anatomical studies). His lines in the lower left (look at the backs of the figures) are deepened into the flesh to produce bodies that resemble cadavers as much as they are alive, whose movement is burdened and whose disposition is ruminative, and movement heavy and weighed down. Moving up, over and down becomes a visual improvisation on this aging theme where death is being ruminated over and age, in its variance, considered.
-The work becomes a synecdoche of aging Michelangelos: in the left corner is himself observing the action and questioning it, with Peter a middle point between as his surrogate denouncing it, and the lower right lumbering giant another, resigned to it and contemplating it, its morals, the meaning of it. These are in the process from yearning (the figure in the blue turban) and then contemptuous (Peter on the cross) to resignation (the lumbering giant descending on the lower right) and also represent different periods in his life and different changes in his disposition, even deformations in him physically, as was of great concern (that he found himself ugly and unattractive, flawed and undeserving) and this was a period of great illness (where he himself almost died, where his friends and loved ones were dying) and great suffering, great quandaries of his own art and, thus, faith (intricately tied to each other)
-The once beautiful male bodies, a source and representation of God’s art and of divine illumination, are now wretched and in a disturbed and disillusioned dialect between this power and this route to Grace, and with the heavy and burdened contemplation of aging and death culminated in the figure and the all-seeing eye of the soon to be crucified Peter (who is also felt and identified as Michelangelo himself). This dialect is further seen in the bodies themselves, a torsion muddled by pain and heaviness and the cumbersome and the now empty aesthetic of their musculature, their contours, their empty color left further empty by ecliptic (instead of divine) light.
-This light, this ecliptic sorrow and haunted foreboding, is given additional purpose by Michelangelo’s premeditated placement of the frescoes. In The Crucifixion of St Peter, he placed it reverse from the open windows that could cast light upon it and leave its spirit dimmed and without hope, slow motion and gloomy, while with The Conversion of Saul he has placed it so that, through the opposite and open windows above St Peter and in the gazed direction of sun light, the reverse would occur altering its lighting dynamism throughout the day and playing with its colors so as to increase its sense of change and movement and visionary fantasy (exploiting its versatility and emotional flux, ambiguity, spotaneity)
-Further dirtying the morals, increasing the haunt of Michelangelo’s gloom and internal, existential quandary, the roles between hero and villain are ambiguous and reversed and a sense of covert evil creeps in furthering his pessimism, wolves in sheep’s clothing: those who are directing and taking action to crucify Peter are beautiful and handsome while those who are “innocents” and spectators or saying and doing nothing are ugly or drawn as despicable loathsome creatures, some of them almost monstrous
-And what of the presumed mistakes, however unlikely, where Michelangelo has rendered several figures out of proportion to each other, the spatial dimensions, and the scene — apparently violating the Rennaissance laws of proportion? Have you looked closely at Peter and assumed his POV? He is ambiguously angled to the side, on the way to being upside down, while tilting his head and upturned towards Saul and the rest of the Chapel. The fluctuation of body size and perspectival undulation in the painting is, astoundingly, a disorientation in perspective that, between being upside down and partially right side up, one eye looking one way and the other partway into his own painting’s space, would cause such distortion and disorientation in space — almost vertiginous — and the relative sizes of things. Peter’s positioning and relation to the exterior of the painting outside of itself and protruding into the Chapel space, causes a flummoxed sense of dimension that he is ambiguously tied to the internal space of the painting while also leaning out into the real space. This enhances the immediacy of his glare into our reality and across to the painting of Saul, while at the same time keeping it and him emotionally and spatially still tied to the environment and people of the painting inside. It is extraordinarily deep and purposeful, compositionally profound, foreshortening. Furthermore, the characters on the left seem more deeply and heavily and pronouncedly grounded inside the painted space while (after the lowest figures seem to arrive into it from external space), in unison to the turn and movement of Peter’s cross, the people on the right and heading down, increasingly protrude forward and eventually (with the horrified group of women) collapse out into our space, the cross and its turn toward an upward stance becoming the axis that turns and climaxes the whole perimeter of the painting and climaxes the fact of it into Reality.
-The figures as well, tied to Michelangelo/Peter, individually as in their dispositions and in the emotional emptiness, dispirit or even trollish derelict of their countenance or wretched bodies, further reflect a revolving rumination of Michelangelo’s own doubts, inner turmoil and a collapse or devastation and then climactic epiphany over his own aesthetic and Art, in unison to the striking epiphany to be had by seeing the vision and denouncement that occurs in looking back upon Saul (where Peter lifts and turns his head while also on the cross, advancing his sight, awareness, epiphany outside of the painting into reality and the transcendent realm of Saul’s vision). They also reflect his lingering ruminations on old age and death, the ruin and deformation of the body
-On top of all this, St Peter is “sculpting” through the geometric traversal of his turn left to right, also up, circular and over, into the vision of the future dome of St Peter’s from which his future burial in that same ground beneath his crucifixion will be erected in monument to

Added notes to properly integrate, add to analysis:
-Peter once denied Christ, on trial, and here he is himself a mirror of Christ, himself now on trial as in crucifixion amongst his executioners, and in a sense putting the present Pope and subordinates on trial by his glare and command, experienced vicariously through Christ, down through Michelangelo as well, down through any who reply in his glare that are now counting he unflinchingly as in the same way he had to do with Jesus in the face of his lies/betrayal/denial of Christ and then repent because he eventually could not (also mirrored in Saul’s now seeing and knowing Jesus after denying and persecuting him)
-Peter is the first Pope, commanding the present one in his Chapel, and all successive ones. Saul is the first persecutor who Jesus completely flips to Christianity, showing that anyone can repent and that forgiveness is total for those who completely give themselves of the Lord. Many symbolic correlations to its present day Church, Counter Reformation, Michelangelo, an endlessly fascinating dialect between all where meanings are transformed, dual, multiplied, double sided…
-In Saul, he is turned, eyes closed, almost weeping, while Bracci arrives and walks near in person but also directed away and lost from him and on a different path, yet also permanently fixed in what is also a transfigured, heavenly vision (afterlife echoed) … push and pull between platonic affection and yet moving away from him, someone he can’t quite reach but admires and feels close to from afar (symbolic of their actual relations)

EPIPHANY:
-In The Conversion of Saul, the astonishing occurs in correlation and unexpected alignment to the apparently incongruous content and composition of the Crucifixion of St Peter, and vice versa: where Saul lies sorrowful, pained, blinded, in epiphany and transforming into a Christian from persecutor, the full gamut and trajectory of his epiphany and life-change is yet sourced and contained also in the painting of St Peter where the dialect occurs between that, mounted and fused against his own painting’s vision as if a cognitive dissonance between them, is as follows: the profoundly empty, disillusioned, spiritually empty figures, evildoers and those listlessly following orders or to spectate, to allow and to carry out the execution of Peter, is the foreseeable culmination of the very persecution, its mentality and now apathetic resignation, and emptying of the spirit that Saul himself was hitherto calling for to be denying Christians their faith, by demanding they denounce their religion and all that they believe in. The persecution of St Peter himself, itself a mirror of the persecution of Jesus, which Jesus himself called out to Saul in telling him that by persecuting Christians he was in fact persecuting Him. That here he finds a haunting disquiet, a silent horror and consequences of which none of the figures surrounding Peter (until those women, and of course Peter himself, looking and leaning or falling out of the painting becoming aware of Reality, the space and cognitive grasp between each) seem to to be truly aware of, that this scene seems so quiet and deaf and mute, blind to the tragedy and blind to the horror, is also the mirror that reflects the bottom of Saul’s own losing of the senses but the stark emotional reality is emptier, apathetic and more deeply internalized, the final straw before one cannot stand it any further, his lowest point before an epiphany and transfiguration can take place. This is the other end of his vision, the harbinger and emptiness and horror that he sees, eyes closed, the pain, combined with with the vision and upending transfiguration (in his own painting) that the light of Jesus and now the progression to a new moral state has brought about, as we see Saul on his side overcome by apology, sorrow, emotion.
-Similarily, for Peter peering into the vision across from him, Saul’s own painting shows the immense body-splitting pain and overwhelming claustrophobic entrapment and agony that he is about to endure on the cross (the splay and forced pull of the bodies from the center; the stultified motion held tightly in place, the forced tension and forced torsion against the will and space to move). But it also shows this in the sense that he must persist through and not let his faith die with his body, as a newfound autonomy that each figure (metaphors of his own) fight for, as it will result in the new Church, alluded to and dreamed of in the envisioned “misty” structure in the distant right which seems to allude to the future (now the old) St Peters Basilica, which the agony and new destiny of the figures point to as the will of God (and the will Peter must partake) through all the pain and inner dissonance (metaphor for the positive end of his ordeal). He must now peer into the darkness and see the heavenly light; to be repurposed through his afterlife, the ultimate serving of Jesus/God, and the good that will come in the agony and the hour of darkness and for which others cannot see nor hear calling him (reflected in the quietude of his own painting, through the pained deafness and confusion and beautiful heaven and colors found through the darkness and obfuscation of Saul’s). While Jesus in the sky, angels in tow, painted like a dream, is the heavenly vision he will honor and spring inspiration from, the hope he will draw and keep in mind as he agonizes towards death. It is fitting then, in a genius and profound touch of Michelangelo, that Peter (within but peering and leaning out from his painting) tilts his head from being upside down to right side up, because in this way it reverses the pose from the upside down Jesus (in Saul’s painting) so as not to mimic him.
-Michelangelo’s profound loneliness and struggle is further pronounced by these paintings in the extreme cognitive and mental and emotional separation of each paintings key figures from their surroundings in that each work is honed in on an individual (as opposed to the more universal magnitude and vision of the Sistine), the axis of all the rest but simultaneously individuated from it, both representative of sides and the introspective disposition and emotional state of the artist separated from his own time and place. In Saul he is separated, isolated to all by the extreme pain and emotion that only he knows with eyes closed amidst all his companions and that surrounds him. With Peter, Michelangelo is cognitive to only what he knows and that can now see while the others around him are listless, deadened, empty. This is a metaphoric account of reflections on the death of his loved ones all around him, thoughts through illness and disfigurement and of pending death in himself (also in his reflection of the various surrogates at each major stage of the work). It is furthermore a condemnation of the Catholic Church’s (not the religion or God itself) and its persecution complex towards those who do not follow their rules, and the paintings combined moral aim is to express both the foundation of religion, including haunted by its derivation, in his present day Italy, and to emotively hoist, almost evangelically, haunted himself by, in outreach and outrage and outcry through the emotional devastation of Saul and through the demanding glare and awareness of Peter, a call to arms, a wake up call for reformation of the Church’s actions. It is fitting that the tilt and glare of Peter not only leans and reaches out into Reality, the space of the Chapel, but additionally follows one across the aisle from any position and view along the way through, as in a demand of the Pope himself and his subordinates.
-The Conversion of Saul is, furthermore, metaphorically of the “Active Life” while The Crucifixion of St Peter reflects the “Contemplative Life”, major preoccupations of Michelangelo and during the Renaissance and as a whole means towards spiritual realization and transfiguration. Diametrically, Saul’s painting also harbors “The Contemplative Life” (eyes closed, its internalized visionary nature) while Peter’s hides, eyes wide open and demanding action, alluding to, much harbored and of future action and construction (the Dome its motion elicits) and of course terrible violence, sacrifice, that is yet contradictory and “positive” on its end, to also reflect “The Active Life”.
-The infantile, sometimes creepy, sometimes trollish and immature faces, coupled with the derelict or mismatched clothes, the immaturity, the limping gestures of The Crucifixion of St Peter reflect a profound rumination on Michelangelo’s faith and art, an open wound and question, now humbled instead of asserted. That this is intentional is demonstrated by the matured contrast of characters and the more nuanced, modeled and detailed skin and parts of their faces in the Conversion of Saul, whereas here they are either infantile, immature, ugly/derelict, or some (the main executioners) merely handsomely empty and youthful. These in Crucifixion of St Peter are bodies grown well into adulthood, but in dialect with immaturity or elderly senility, ambiguous between childhood and old age, ruminating on life and death, each an unanswered question in the quest, the quandary of Michelangelo’s revised art, that has become doubtful of its previous spirit and conviction. Even Peter is an old face topping a rather virile and muscled body. Even his old face is the oldest among them and his absurd predicament leaving him the closest to body death. He (Peter, though Michelangelo) is now surrounded by his demons, his own art, the body as temple, as if turning against him, proved wrong, questioning his faith and carrying out his crucifixion. Michelangelo, reflecting on himself in Peter (and his end to end surrogates that form a diagonal traversal along the axis that leads through the trajectory of cross and the composition, giving it the main nudge of force and purpose it has, subtly offering its subjective source as that of the artist) and then too those around him, encircled, an absurd situation of martyrdom (reflecting the forced position of his artistic endeavors) and surrounding him are the bodies that were once representative of his peaking artistic life and the offering to God of his spiritual salvation, those bodies of divine illumination, but are now devoid of this, oblivions of quandary and de-spirited through his own feelings of artistic and real-life martyrdom, he himself erupting and devastated through the Saul of the first fresco and now the Peter of the second, to and fro, an emotional outburst and reach towards forgiveness, sacrifice, transfiguration in an offering of a helpless art, stripped of its confidence before and now presented open-ended and humbled, while also in the face of Peter out into the Chapel, demanding the Church do the same in its own needed act of revision and conversion.

TO BE CONTINUED… MOST OF THE GIST OR THE MAIN COMPONENTS ARE NOW IN PLACE… STILL NEEDS TO BE POLISHED UP, SOME DETAILS ADDED, VARIOUS POINTS/DESCRIPTIONS MADE CLEARER OR EXPLAINED BETTER… ALSO NEEDS EDITING: SEVERAL PASSAGES ARE A BIT LONG WINDED IN MY RUSH (WITH LITTLE TIME FOR MORE CARE) TO SAY “EVERYTHING” WITHOUT SLOWING DOWN TO FINE TUNE WHAT I WAS WRITING, TO MAKE IT MORE CONCISE, ETC. I WILL FIX THIS IN DUE TIME…

Medici Chapel: The Sagrestia Nuova - Michelangelo Buonarroti (1555) [Sculpture and Architecture]

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MAIN FRONT VIEW - Tomb of Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici with Night and Day: https://www.viabizzuno.com/img/public/2...ole_52.jpg
MAIN FRONT VIEW - DETAIL - Tomb of Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici with Night and Day: https://www.viabizzuno.com/img/public/2...ole_56.jpg
GIULIANO DI LORENZO DE' MEDICI - VERY LARGE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/...otostream/
NIGHT - VERY LARGE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/...otostream/
NIGHT - DETAIL: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/48169932291/
DAY - VERY LARGE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/...otostream/
DAY - DETAIL: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/...otostream/
NIGHT AND DAY - DETAIL: https://www.viabizzuno.com/img/public/2...ole_58.jpg
MAIN VIEW - Tomb of Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici with Dusk and Dawn & Surrounding Architecture: https://1890056479.rsc.cdn77.org/rivist...orenzo.JPG
MAIN FRONT VIEW - VERY LARGE - Tomb of Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici with Dusk and Dawn: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/...otostream/
VIEW - VERY LARGE - Tomb of Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici with Dusk and Dawn: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...renz-1.jpg
LORENZO DI PIERO DE' MEDICI - VERY LARGE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/...otostream/
LORENZO DI PIERO DE' MEDICI - LOW ANGLE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/...otostream/
DUSK - VERY LARGE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/48170001352/
DAWN - VERY LARGE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/...otostream/
DAWN - VERY LARGE - ALTERNATE ANGLE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/...otostream/
DAWN - DETAIL: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/48169999607/
DAWN - DETAIL: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/...otostream/
DAWN - DETAIL: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorge-11/...otostream/
OVERHEAD VIEW: https://www.viabizzuno.com/img/public/2...ole_53.jpg
MAIN VIEW - Tomb - Medici Madonna, San Cosma and San Domano: https://1890056479.rsc.cdn77.org/rivist...nifici.JPG
MEDICI MADONNA: https://1890056479.rsc.cdn77.org/rivist...ambino.JPG
SAN COSMA: https://1890056479.rsc.cdn77.org/rivist...-cosma.JPG
SAN DOMANO: https://1890056479.rsc.cdn77.org/rivist...amiano.JPG
FULL VIEW - LARGE - CEILING AND UPPER WALLS: https://www.viabizzuno.com/img/public/2...ole_54.jpg
FULL VIEW - LARGE - CEILING VIEW FROM THE FLOOR: https://www.francozampetti.com/f/sagres...&pid=1
360 DEGREE PANORAMIC VIEW: https://www.360cities.net/image/09-medi...ht-and-day
360 DEGREE 3D MODEL AND VIRTUAL TOUR: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/michela...96d5b3e6a9
VIDEO TOUR - VERY HIGH QUALITY - Sagrestia Nuova @ 1:55: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgaqqgwgaAs
VIDEO - WALKING TOUR - Sagrestia Nuova @ 22:50: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNxm_ztcEV4
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Medici Chapel, Sagrestia Nuova, Florence, Italy: https://www.barnum-review.com/wp-conten...24x681.jpg
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Medici Chapel, Sagrestia Nuova, Florence, Italy: https://www.barnum-review.com/wp-conten...24x681.jpg

Notes for future analysis:

(Even for an incomplete set of “notes” the following needs editing. It was very haphazardly written, just notes taken at various times when I was learning more about and analyzing the work. Features some mistakes and some notes also repeat other notes, due to this being multiple parts of separate notes just thrown together. In other words, I am just throwing this on here for now and will edit and improve these “notes” sooner or later. Eventually the idea would also be a more “professionally written” analysis, hence “notes for future analysis”.)

Two Dukes as main figures in the work, died unexpectedly, causing a crises in the Medici family that their lineage could end and that perhaps the ego's and extravagance were being punished by God.

Vasari, referring to classical architecture vs the visionary Medici Chapel: "broke the bonds and chains that had previously confined them to the creation of traditional forms"

Michelangelo moves beyond that into a more "subjective" expression with architecture, no longer mimicking or reviving the ancient or classical past.

Everything in the room is in "tension" or opposition of elements, though at the same time sublimated.

Technically the work is unfinished, or at least we think it is (it’s not entirely clear, because we don’t know for sure if Michelangelo didn’t just change his plans). Based on research, it likely would’ve featured an additional much larger double tomb (part of which is the Medici Madonna) for the more prominent Medici(s) that had passed, with an additional, more elaborate sculpture and a Resurrection painting (by Michelangelo) in half-circle above. And the other two tombs may have featured the fascinating idea of two additional sculptures, “river gods” lying directly on the floor. None of the tomb’s sculptures have official bases/pedestals. They are lying “directly” on their surfaces, on the sarcophogi. The idea seems to have been to fuse painting, architecture and sculpture into one – a bit like The Sistine Chapel did all suggested “through” painting, only here each would be infact its own actual art form (painting is actual painting, the sculpture is actual sculpture, the architecture real architecture, none fictive)

The work expresses a remarkable and unique state of resignation, unanimity (despite Mannerist, dense, means and technicalities in the sculpture and surrounding lower rung of architecture), reflecting the fall or reconsideration of the Medici’s prior bravado and extravagance; feelings that God may be punishing the family for being too ego-tistical, extravagant and and that their bloodline is being threatened by these unexpected deaths.

Resignation, inwardness, purgatory, abstraction, ambiguity among all the figures and (incredibly) the architecture too (a new form of “Mannerist” architecture, featuring remarkable and singular ideas that would also be developed and populate the Laurentian Library vestibule)

Death, increasing illumination, buoyancy, resurrection is being expressed by the stages of the ascending levels of architecture (with counterpoints to the protagonists being expressed in the sculptures, where the surrounding architecture seems to conceptualize their fate from God and their thought processes in confronting this upon death).

Lowest level of architecture (walls, doors, windows, pillars, etc) is all an expression of Purgatory, the consideration of one’s state before expunging sin and reaching Heaven. As the architecture rises, so does its ascendance towards increasing heavenly considerations. This is also supported by how Michelangelo played with light, with the room and architecture and sculpture being at its darkest in the lowest echelon, and then carefully considered (not overdone) light entering in with real windows as we rise and then the “floating” dome at the point of the vaulted ceiling. The density of the lowest level features an incredibly unique density of ideas, false windows, false doors, pillars inside frames, surrounded by larger pillars as confounding structures that aren’t (technically) supporting another structure that would call for this (like another ceiling). These confounding densities of “unnecessary” architectural details are abstractions of thought and consideration in the realm of Purgatory before we/the protagonists advance and take into account the next stage. The frames and perimeters of the architecture quite literally suggest the movement and increasing density of thought, ascending through the symmetry and suggested trajectory of the architectural composition as it flows more complicatedly and densely to an increasing freedom and “floating” expression (one will literally “feel” this if one follows each line/frame and direction of the architecture’s composition from the bottom up). These abstract concepts are suggested by how Michelangelo composed the progression of ideas (like a trajectory of consciousness) where (for instance) the “half-circles” that populate the “windows” of the lower section, open up in “ecstatic” or “buoyant” half circles above them, the windows become real windows (from false ones below that are "walled-off", part of Purgatory), and the tops of these are developed into triangular tops from half-circular ones, with the space increasing, opening up into larger embrasive shapes, and the density decreasing. At the top the circles become complete, the triangles supporting them ecstatic and elastic. Also, the lower rung advances from an overwhelm of white (with densely packed darker pillars hemmed in with such) into an increased reliance on the darker facades giving the white more simplicity and space to shape and open up the space (these figures are, again, as if “trajectories of thought” or “abstract concept” being “envisioned, considered”, an extremely unique architectural expression from Michelangelo).

(^^^ Note: the above paragraph is quickly and haphazardly written from various notes I took and will be edited to include more descriptive, precise architectural terms to describe better what is meant)

The two (central, opposite wall) Dukes are not of their likeness. Michelangelo took great creative liberties on their representation, preferring (as is generally the case with him) to impose his own artistic considerations and tendencies above the restrictions of reality or strict representation so that he can symbolically express ideas rather than an explicit picture of exact persons.

In ancient times the day was broken up into four parts. 2 "active" times of day = Day/Night. 2 "passive" times of day = Dawn/Dusk

Night: Crescent moon and star on headband. Satyr mask, symbol of fallacy "a curtain of darkness falls which masks us all" (Michelangelo poem). Poppies (opium) narcotic of sleep. Lunar glow from extra polish of figure.

Figures compliment and contrast each other, dominated by relaying, trading tension/inverse or comparable movements that seem to fuse and react to each other. Day is turning inward (bodily), Night is open (bodily), though Day's head is rising (like a sun). Night's head is bowing down into its own shadow (darkness).

Juliano: Baton indicates he is a military figure/leader (to impart orders unto soldiers). Baton and armour indicates a great military figure. Motif on chest, grotesque face, somewhat like a rodent. Mouse is a symbol of death in context of this figure. Petrarch (a source of inspiration of Michelangelo's work here and his next favorite poet after Dante) wrote a poem called "triumph of time": "fame can conquer death but ultimately time will conquer fame". Metaphor for time is a mouse who is described as nibbling away at a building eventually bringing it down.

Niches to immediate left/right were to include figures of "Grieving Earth" and "Rejoicing Heaven".

Novel idea of sculptures without pedestals/stands. The allegorical sculptures of the Duke’s tombs are basically laying directly on the architecture, upon the sarcophogi. Originally also wanted sculpted “River Gods” occupying floor space beneath the sarcophogi of each of the Duke’s tombs.

Duke’s face visitor as he/she enters, intentionally left ambiguous as to whether really “looking at” us or not, pitting the viewer in an immediate position to consider these sculptures. Is also looking at the Medici Madonna across the room, and not at the altar on the other side of the room.

Duke 1: represented allegorically, not actual likeness. Long neck, turned, more “alert” representing “the active life”. Open shirt shows lots of “potential” or “summoning” action by the tension and turning movement and immense (unleashed) strength/physical power in the torso and chest. Michelangelo invents an armor that is practically a substitute for skin and features death symbol insignia.

Duke 2 “Lorenzo”: Pensive, contemplating. Pronated arm symbol of death. Left elbow rests on cash box with animal face. Hand on chin, holding cloth. Blank eyes looking at Madonna but also into “eternity”.

Lower allegorical figures are very unique development of sculptural art. We are no longer in the age of the David, or the Pieta. Michelangelo has shaped them into meditations on time: day/night and dawn/dusk … He is reliant (mostly) on body language and metaphor and the degrees of finish/polish (or lack thereof).

Night: feminine and masculine, very muscular, immense tension and contortion. Body is bent into impossible pose and contortion (Michelangelo is intentionally discarding his earlier physical realism for meaning, metaphor). Head down, curling inward as with the top half of the body ... musculature extremely tight as if moving, turning inward "upon itself", body is contorting into an inward momentum that seems to forgo (leave behind, "replace") "itself" (as if the upper body is soon going to blanket the lower body), further expressing "night" overtaking day (and probably the idea of death/time overtaking life). The body is simultaneously bulging with intensity and "spent". Poised ambiguously between sleep and wakefulness. Illustrious shine, radiance that suggests an imposed (through sculpture alone!) “moon light”. Surrounding her are symbols that represent darkness, death (the owl, the hollow mask upon a mask upon a mask).

Day: Immense, high-tension, musculature, impossible body contortion and pose. His face is among Michelangelo’s invention of the “non-finito” in art. His head seems to rise above his body/right shoulder as a visual metaphor of the sun rising above hills/the horizon, the indeterminancy and ambiguity of Time. Where “non-finito” it seems to express the gradation and changing of light across the different parts of its surface (in other words, Michelangelo is using the “non-finito” to express the qualities of light on the sculpture through the physical sculpture alone, a first in the history of art; before this was used the light of the space solely and the change of position from which one looks at the sculpture – such as his David – but now this change/passage of time is also being expressed in the very stone itself, with no change in position of the viewer or difference in lighting of the room necessary to see it). The convolution and musculature and how the body is turning “over” (“revolving” into the direction of the wall) – while the “sun” of the head rises and peaks outward into the chapel – is all counterpointing among its own inter-related parts (and against/in relation to the whole chapel itself) to express the motion of time (turning clockwise, like the “revolving” body and its turning/twisting parts) as the day opens up, as time flows forward, as light opens up and the prior darkness recedes across its surface (again, further developed by the whole composition and lighting trajectory of the chapel; all an expression of resurrection, Purgatory, the passage of time, of life and death).

Dawn: Precariously perched as if about to fall off the sarcophogi. Lifitng of the cloth veil suggest that the cloak of darkness is being removed. Vacant eyes and open but equally vacant mouth leave us suspended between silence (and vision) and speech, metaphor for suspension between light and dark of dawn, also perhaps “eternity”.

Dusk: Similarly “non-finito” especially the head, contrast with polish of much of the chest, torso, legs. Parts of the body (feet) seem sinking back into the stone, and the other “non-finito” parts further express “dusk”. The body position, sunken and barely awake, further expresses the ambiguity of gradual decline, twilight.

MEDICI MADONNA: Add analysis of additional figures... etc

Unique arrangement: the altar is placed so that the priest would stand behind it, standing in a small space looking out into the larger space ... with the statues facing away from him looking to the Madonna and Child (Medici Madonna), with the priest facing that way, paralleling them

Ground level: 8 doors, only 1 was functional (at the time). Each closed door has moulding surrounding it, including the bottom, increasing the sense of its falseness. Above all doors and surrounding the space are niches, traditionally only for sculptures to be presented inside. Exposing the niche AS the sculpture, sculpture and architecture as one?

There are 8 doors around the floor of the chapel. 4 of them are false doors (don’t open/close), purely decorative (part of Purgatory). 8 the numerological representation of resurrection, infinity.

Due to the architecture and how Michelangelo placed the windows, the light is very subtly controlled to give one the sense that we are “among the dead” at and near the floor of the chapel, where (without additional, artificial lighting) it is rather dim-lit, adding foreboding and chiarascuro to the sculptures and architecture, while the light increases gradually as one ascends towards the ceiling.

The circular dome above has a very light, weightless buoyancy to it. Its grand but “quiet” circular design (referencing the pantheon), with adjacent circular designs.

Contrary to the “unattractiveness” of the female figures that may seem “grotesque” or the breasts too “bulbous” to most heterosexual men today, this is more a modern phenomenon than one that would've seemed out of place in Michelangelo's time. While Michelangelo took these expressive preoccupations farther than probably any artist of his time, evidence from contemporary critics is that these females were praised especially because of their "masculine" qualities. Regardless of how “incorrect” it may seem to modern eyes, in Michelangelo’s time this was considered a form of praise (to make them more masculine, perhaps a symbol of their lessened association from “original sin”, a symbol of strength, lack of weakness -- moral and physical). One must also observe and remember that Michelangelo’s men were also physically exaggerated (as was common in, particularly the Mannerist and Baroque periods -- both male and female) and just as individualized in their expression and symbolism (not to mention that earlier examples prove he was completely capable of very feminine and beautiful women by today's standards. For instance, in sculpture the Pieta and his various Madonnas; for painting his stunning early yet incomplete, Manchester Madonna: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/pain...er-madonna ... or the slim unfinished female figures in his incomplete Entombment: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...angelo.jpg )

Precursor/invention of a uniquely Mannerist sculpture and architecture and an extraordinary expression in art history in that, through essentially Mannerist (exaggerated, dense, convoluted) means, Michelangelo manages to yet express abstract, ineffable, resigned, esoteric concepts -- abstract conceptual art -- centuries before Modern art.

-Added: mauseleum for earlier Lorenzo (highest sculpture in the Chapel) and his tragic brother for which he often mourned. Mauseleum for Michelangelo himself, struck with expectant death (hiding in its secret room, aged) as in the likeness of dusk (almost replicated in The Crucifixion of St Peter).

-3 women: Madonna, Night, Dawn form and interconnected triad from the Venuses of Boticelli (thus, the history of Florence) as pagan reflections of the Madonna at different junctures and dispositions in life and in her sacrifice. Dawn is practically erotic and may represent the Venus in the throes of the immaculate conception. It is also placed so that light would beam upon it, illuminating it, accentuating this theme.


The Deposition - Michelangelo Buonarroti (1555) [Sculpture] [aka, "Bandini Pietà" or "The Lamentation over the Dead Christ"]

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MAIN VIEW: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
ANGLED VIEW - VIEWER'S RIGHT: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
ANGLED VIEW - VIEWER'S LEFT: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucker/50515296542
ANGLED VIEW - VIEWER'S LEFT: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
ANGLED VIEW - BACK SIDE - VIEWER'S LEFT: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
DETAIL - VIEWER'S LEFT: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence, Italy: https://www.theflorentine.net/wp-conten...4886-1.jpg

Laurentian Library - Michelangelo Buonarroti (Begun 1525, completed posthumously, 1571; Tribune of Elci rotunda added by Pasquale Poccianti in 1841) / Basilica di San Lorenzo di Firenze, Florence, Italy [Architecture]

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VESTIBULE WALL - DETAILS / PILLARS: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
VESTIBULE WALLS - WINDOWS / BLIND WINDOWS: https://buffaloah.com/a/virtual/italy/f...rLIB_3.jpg
VESTIBULE WALL: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
VESTIBULE CORNER - UPWARD VIEW: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
VESTIBULE CORNER - BRACKETS: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
VESTIBULE WALL - "HANGING" BRACKETS: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
VESTIBULE STAIRCASE - OVERHEAD VIEW: http://www.museumsinflorence.com/foto/b...stears.jpg
VESTIBULE STAIRCASE & WALL - SIDE VIEW: http://www.museumsinflorence.com/foto/b...scale1.jpg
VESTIBULE STAIRCASE & READING ROOM ENTRANCE - SIDE VIEW: https://buffaloah.com/a/virtual/italy/f...rLIB_2.jpg
VESTIBULE STAIRCASE & READING ROOM ENTRANCE - SIDE VIEW: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
VESTIBULE TO READING ROOM - ENTRANCE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
VESTIBULE TO READING ROOM - ENTRANCE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
READING ROOM: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
READING ROOM: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
READING ROOM - CEILING: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
READING ROOM - STAIN GLASS: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucke...otostream/
IMAGE GALLERY: https://buffaloah.com/a/virtual/italy/f...o/lib.html
IMAGE FOR SCALE - Laurentian Library, Florence, Italy: https://exurbe.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/4.jpg

St. Peter's Basilica - Principal Architects: Donato Bramante (1503 - 1514); Michelangelo Buonarroti (1546 - 1564); Carlo Maderno (1603 - 1629); Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1629 - 1676) (Building completed and opened 1626; various additions thereafter) / Vatican City, Rome, Italy [Architecture]

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Central External View:

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External View - St. Peter's Square and Colonnade:

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Central External View - Facade and Obelisk:

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Interior - Central Nave:

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Interior - Altar and Dome:

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Interior - Dome and Altar:

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Interior - South (Left) Transept:

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Interior - North (Right) Transept:

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Interior - Apse and Chair of St. Peter:

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360 DEGREE PANORAMIC VIEW - CENTRAL POINT OF ST. PETER'S: https://www.360cities.net/image/st-pete...-vatican-3
360 DEGREE PANORAMIC VIEW - BALCONY OF ST. PETER'S DOME: https://www.360cities.net/image/balcony...city-italy
VIRTUAL TOUR: https://www.vatican.va/various/basilich...ex-en.html
VIDEO - WALKING TOUR - VERY HIGH QUALITY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B54PR2kvWE
VIDEO - EXTENDED GRAND TOUR - VERY HIGH QUALITY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvjtzKUaq-s
FLOORPLAN, HISTORICAL INFO AND INSIGHTS: http://stpetersbasilica.info/floorplan.htm
HISTORICAL INFO, INSIGHTS AND PHOTOS: http://www.digital-images.net/Gallery/S...s_ext.html
HISTORICAL INFO, DETAILS, PHOTO GALLERY: https://buffaloah.com/a/virtual/italy/r...er/tc.html
FULLY IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL 3D TOUR: https://virtual.basilicasanpietro.va/en

Rondanini Pieta - Michelangelo Buonarroti (1564) / Sforza Castle, Milan, Italy [Sculpture]

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THREE VIEWS - "METAMORPHOSIS": http://www.peterveres.com/uploads/4/5/9...iews_1.jpg
MAIN VIEW - ZOOM FUNCTION: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset...&hl=en
BACK VIEW - ZOOM FUNCTION: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset...&hl=en
PANORAMIC VIEW - SFORZA CASTLE ROOM - RONDANINI PIETA: https://artsandculture.google.com/story...LnIw?hl=en
VIDEO - INFORMATIONAL, EXCELLENT PHOTOGRAPHY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py7HIYjXpTw
VIDEO - FULL VIEW IN SITU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk1UmV0hroc
_________________
Best Classical
Best Films
Best Paintings

[RoundTheBend]

Sorry to interrupt the standard programming... just read the OP and wanted to say that Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 is easily top 3 paintings at the Getty. Good stuff.

[AfterHours]

[RoundTheBend]

double post

[RoundTheBend]

[Applerill]

Why isn’t there any MS Paint representation?

[RoundTheBend]

[AfterHours]

[AfterHours]

[AfterHours]

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)

Best Works:
7.0/10: The Annunciation (circa 1475)
7.5/10: Virgin of the Rocks (circa 1483-1486) [Paris/Louvre Version]
8.8/10: The Last Supper (1497)
7.5/10: Mona Lisa (1505)

The Annunciation - Leonardo da Vinci (circa 1475)

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FULL VIEW - LARGE: https://www.analisidellopera.it/wp-cont...azione.jpg
FULL VIEW - HIGHEST QUALITY - ZOOM FUNCTION: https://www.haltadefinizione.com/visual...o-da-vinci
VIDEO - ALTERNATE, ANAMORPHIC PERSPECTIVE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFL_2L634Zw
IMAGE - UFFIZI GALLERY, ITALY: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/M902F0/floren...M902F0.jpg

Virgin of the Rocks - Leonardo da Vinci (circa 1483-1486) [Paris/Louvre Version]

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FULL VIEW - VERY LARGE: https://gallerix.org/storeroom/991555443/N/1612438096/
IMAGE - Louvre: https://media.cntraveller.in/wp-content...inci-1.jpg
IMAGE - Louvre: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EHnacrbU4AE0TVl.jpg

The Last Supper - Leonardo da Vinci (circa 1495 - 1498) / Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy

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FULL VIEW - VERY LARGE: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...inci_5.jpg
FULL VIEW - VERY LARGE - ZOOM FUNCTION: https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/last...ography/2/
FULL VIEW - HIGHEST QUALITY - ZOOM FUNCTION: https://www.haltadefinizione.com/visual...da-vinci-1
FULL VIEW - HIGHEST QUALITY - ZOOM FUNCTION: https://cenacolovinciano.org/en/museum/...1452-1519/
GIAMPIETRINO'S REPRODUCTION - FULL VIEW - VERY LARGE - HIGHEST QUALITY - ZOOM FUNCTION (to help illustrate the details, difficult to see in Da Vinci's deteriorated original): https://artsandculture.google.com/asset...Swj5Pus85w
TONGERLO OIL COPY: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/cont...%80%99.jpg
TONGERLO OIL COPY - DETAIL: https://www.artdependence.com/media/803...ngerlo.jpg
IMAGE FOR SCALE - SANTA MARIA DELLE GRAZIE, MILAN, ITALY: https://youth-time.eu/wp-content/upload...1a3_XL.jpg
IMAGE FOR SCALE - SANTA MARIA DELLE GRAZIE, MILAN, ITALY: https://kbotkin.files.wordpress.com/201...g_9829.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ECB-PKeWsAA...name=large
https://www.evenopstap.be/wp-content/up...1181_3.jpg
http://yab.be/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_9937.jpg

Earlier pic: https://e.snmc.io/i/fullres/w/a746c4be2...01/7950706

INCOMPLETE ANALYSIS - NOTES/OUTLINE/ROUGH DRAFT:

-Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper is a depiction of the final meal that, in the Gospel accounts, Jesus shared with his apostles in Jerusalem before his crucifixion. Leonardo depicts the moment when Jesus declares:

"Verily I say unto you, that one from among you shall betray me." And struck by a profound consternation, each one of them asked him, ‘Lord, is it I?’ He replied: "He who has shared this meal with me, shall betray me. The Son of man is leaving; as it has been written of him. But, woe betides he who has betrayed the Son of man! That man would wish he had never been born." (Matthew 26; 20-22)

Mona Lisa - Leonardo da Vinci (1505)

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-The Mona Lisa has riddled and fascinated viewers across the centuries, becoming one of the most well-known works of art in history.
-The portrait is that of Lisa Gherardini, finally confirmed in 2005 with what appears to be solid evidence (after centuries of speculation).
-With this work, Da Vinci completely upended conventional portraiture, in technique and form, as well as the emotional, intellectual and psychological depths of his vision.
-Instead of painting the model in profile, as was the custom, Lisa Gherardini is depicted in the act (or at the end of the act), of turning towards the painter to face him. Da Vinci is essentially reproducing the moment of his visionary change to the genre. He depicts her as if she is caught slightly off guard, a knowing gesture from both the painter and the sitter of the change he has introduced (he, knowing of its change relative to art and the ensuing purpose he has for doing it; she, of the unexpectedness of his request to turn towards him instead of sitting in profile). This is one of many signs of a dense enigma throughout the painting.
-Hans Memling, among some others, had indeed painted some earlier portraits from similar positions, turning the model away from profile, but they're only alike superficially. Though a great artist in his own right, Memling was not the genius Da Vinci was (was anyone?), and his novel portraits were not of nearly the same purpose and ambitious, visionary scope as Da Vinci has accomplished with the Mona Lisa (and it is probable that Da Vinci was unaware of Memling's work). Regardless, Da Vinci's masterpiece was certainly revolutionary, at the very least, to the traditional form of Italian portraits (but really, well beyond that). With the Mona Lisa, Da Vinci far transcended even his own revolutionary portrait of just over a decade earlier, Lady with an Ermine, which was perhaps the first to make a concerted effort at unveiling the psychological depths of its model.
-Da Vinci's deeper purpose in turning and facing Lisa Gherardini is not just a novel positional change-up, but a visionary unveiling and unification of both her state of mind, and his, the breadth, sublimation and beckoning enigma of which could not have been achieved in profile. As she has turned towards Da Vinci, each of them are suddenly revealed in a dense, mystical fusion of emotions, visions and subliminal messages intellectual and psychological, earthly and metaphysical, science and spiritual.
-Mona Lisa exhibits Da Vinci’s sfumato technique fully developed, inimitable and without peer. The painstaking techniques applied aligns the figure and background in a miraculous and smooth visual poetry of shadow and light, of gentle gradations of form and depth, of indefinite borders, that captures and reveals the model’s spiritual essence, bringing her physique into a breathtaking vision of unusual presence and the environment into poetic ode or rumination, bordering on the surreal. Her form seems to exist in a separate “dimension” from the environment she is painted in, while also remaining “in” it or specially connected to it. In her face, body and clothing, she is depicted in a smooth, effortless, miraculous beauty of tone and grace as if pictorially elevating from the canvas. The technique evokes characteristics and values that seem infinite and indefinable, evoking the metaphysical, an eternal mystery, an eternal inner state of being. Applying his own invention of aerial perspective, the backdrop fades off into the distance. The rock formations and mountainous ranges, river and landscapes behind her seem to travel off into the ends of the Earth, across an ancient imaginary landacape, into the distant, smoky recesses of thought, enraptured in the ever more metaphysical the further off into the horizon they go. Da Vinci transforms the art of the portrait into the depiction of an entire lifetime, into the infinite.
-Da Vinci had been given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Nuova in Florence and, later, at hospitals in Milan and Rome. With over 240 detailed drawings and about 13,000 written words, he compiled a massive treatise on the human anatomy over the course of several years. His analyses and drawings were far ahead of their time and, if published, would have undoubtedly made major contributions to medical science. One of his many studies that profoundly fascinated him was the study of the female conception of the fetus and the ensuing cycle from inside the womb to birth. He made one of the very first scientific drawings of a fetus while in utero (drawn from an actual model corpse). In painting the Mona Lisa, the peculiar placement of her hands was another novelty (portraits in profile did not include the hands at all). Slightly rounded and plump and covering her stomach, they are very possibly a “hidden” sign that she was pregnant during the painting. It is very possible she had recently gained knowledge of this fact and is, at the moment, keeping it a secret. It may be that her purpose in commissioning the portrait was to celebrate this (Gherardini would’ve been pregnant with any one of her children during various times when the work is believed to have been painted).
-Da Vinci was intensely interested in the formation of the Earth and he spent long periods of time throughout his life studying rocks, landscapes and nature. He was obsessed with water, which he considered for earth what blood is for the human body, a circulatory system like that of humans as it flows from the mountains to the sea and returns again. He considered a human body connected to the whole natural system of the Earth, as a microcosm of it.

“Leonardo mapped the human body. He charted its skeletal rocks, the course of its “rivers” and its fleshy soil, both within and without. He dissected the world, teasing out its bony rocks, its earthly flesh and its watery veins, both in its surface topography and deep within its core… Always, looking at his drawings of real sites, we can sense his urgent concern with the body of the Earth as a functioning system.”
--KEMP, M. (2006): Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, and Design.

-The landscape, mountains, rock formations and water-ways behind Lisa Gherardini, from the left side to the upper right side and back again, exhibit this cyclically. This backdrop appears to extend from the flowing overhang from the shoulder of her dress, and the formations of rock seem to form parallels with the formations and sleeves of her clothing and sculpture. This environment behind her is also metaphorically connected to her mysterious smile. The geometric curvature of the backdrop, from the left-to-right, ascends upwards unnaturally, paralleling the geometric curvature of the uneven smile on her face in the foreground. It seems very possible that between her mysterious smile and the environment are allusions to the secret of her pregnancy. It seems likely that the emotion and mystical beauty with which they are depicted reflect Da Vinci’s psychological immersion, awe and intense scientific and emotional investment in these phenomena, and his correlation between them: Mother Earth, her birth, circulatory system and life cycle; Mona Lisa, Earth’s microcosm, her pregnancy, circulatory system and life cycle.
-Da Vinci was an illegitimate child. In his time, this meant that he was essentially damned to a life of poverty, or at best the attainment of the lower middle class. So he had to make his own way in life, against all odds, a life turned against him from birth. He harbored a tremendous love and sympathy for his poor, unheralded mother who gave birth to him out of wedlock. Lisa Gherardini too, was middle class (in another novelty, portraits of the middle class were very unusual). Even more revealingly, he depicts her, a married woman, without her wedding ring (like his mother). (NOTE: Her depiction as a virtuous woman and faithful wife could have been other reasons for this placement and ring-less depiction of her hands. But I believe Da Vinci, as always, had deeper, more personal, profound and meaningful aspirations, especially those which would evoke his studies, obsessions and preoccupations, symmetrically tying them all together). Her pose also forms a triangle, and it is likely that he intentionally depicted and revealed her in that pose to suggest the holy trinity and a divine relationship or metaphorical correlation with The Virgin Mary, traditionally in the same position when holding Christ. Instead of holding “Christ” in her arms, she is “holding” her child in her stomach, her hands over it. It seems likely that his depiction of the Mona Lisa is also a deep-seated, nostalgic reflection of his mother; he towards his mother and his mother towards him; he towards The Virgin Mary, God and the divine, and The Virgin Mary, God and the divine towards him.
-It has long been widely speculated that Da Vinci was homosexual. One proposed indication of this in his art is that he had a tendency to assign feminine qualities and features to male figures, giving them an androgynous appearance (this was not necessarily uncommon in the Renaissance, so is far from conclusive). The Mona Lisa is certainly no exception and represents the most perplexing, exact balance between male and female he ever depicted. The painting may be a veiled disclosure of himself as homosexual, and perhaps a yearning for God to accept him as such. Particularly around the eyes, sides of the forehead and her nose area, Da Vinci has carefully and subtly changed and shadowed the features, and certainly not to make her look more feminine or beautiful! Portraits were supposed to flatter their models and Da Vinci, through his unparalleled knowledge of the human anatomy and his breathtaking sfumato technique, could have accomplished this well beyond that of anyone else in the period and probably beyond that of anyone in the history of art (see his earlier figures to leave behind all doubt). But instead he seems to have carefully painted her to appear both masculine and feminine, simultaneously, indecisively. It is possible the depiction incorporates that of Andrea Salai, who has been viewed as the model for Da Vinci's earlier, androgynous depiction of St. John the Baptist. Salai was Da Vinci's longtime student, servant, and has been speculated to have been his lover. Regardless of the truth or not of Da Vinci's speculated homosexuality, the painting nonetheless presents an extremely enigmatic portrait in terms of features, beauty, gender and psychology. A small part of its current enigma of visual characteristics may also be attributed to wear and tear of the work, where some parts have lost their original definition (such as the eyebrows), but even dismissing these there is no doubt we are looking into a radiating enigma with even scans and imaging of the work's layers proving that it underwent a long, subtle and careful development of changes from its initial likeness.
-Intensely fascinated by mirrors, Mona Lisa becomes Da Vinci's mirror, a reverberating series of merges and reflections, each of their selves reflecting off of each other from artist to model, model to artist, an infinite metamorphosis, as streams-of-conscious.

“The air is filled with endless images of the objects distributed in it; and all are represented in all, and all in one, and all in each, whence it happens that if two mirrors are placed in such a manner as to face each other exactly, the first will be reflected in the second and the second in the first. The first being reflected in the second takes to it the image of itself with all the images represented in it, among which is the image of the second mirror, and so, image within image, they go on to infinity in such a manner as that each mirror has within it a mirror, each smaller than the last and one inside the other. Thus, by this example, it is clearly proved that every object sends its image to every spot whence the object itself can be seen; and the converse: That the same object may receive in itself all the images of the objects that are in front of it.”
--Leonardo Da Vinci

-True to Da Vinci's studies and fascination with mathematics and geometry, as well as the divine symmetry of all his masterpieces, the Mona Lisa is drawn according to golden ratios. The shape of the painting itself, is a golden rectangle, encapsulating her. Her face is drawn according to a golden rectangle, and if one draws again from the line separating her eyes, it can be seen that this was done according to another golden rectangle. One can find further golden rectangles making up her body (the distance between her face and hands, for example). Furthermore, Da Vinci’s extensive use of sacred geometry can be seen if one studies the work closely enough. I am not sure if I agree with every single aspect presented in the following video; nonetheless, the main point is well illustrated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgq9SsqdyQA

-Fundamentally, the work seems to be a visual poem or hymn to and in praise of the metaphorical Beloved Lady, a mystical, enigmatic ideal of women that was a key inspiration to the Renaissance depictions and through the works of poets like Dante or Petrarch that Da Vinci surely would've known from his time, through his own studies and library of literature and poetry. She is always out of reach. She is as much divine as human; real but abstracted into an inaccessible and elusive ideal.
-It is a final ode and essay on optics, between visions through science and visions by the divine, where everything one sees might at first seem purely physical or straight-forward, but all is backed or sourced by something more, something indefinable except to those that can know it and experience it. Something present but beyond seeing clearly because the divine cannot be seen clearly.

"In her countenance appear such things as manifest a part of the joy of paradise. I mean in her eyes and sweet smile, for here love draws them as to himself. They overwhelm our intellect as a ray of sunlight does weak vision. And since I cannot fix my sight on them, I am content to say but little of them."

"Since in the face the soul operates principally in these two places; that is, in the eyes and in the mouth. It dawns these most of all and directs its full attention to creating beauty there. It is in these two places that I maintain these delights appear in her eyes and in her sweet smile. These two places may be called, by way of a charming metaphor, the balconies of The Lady, who dwells in the edifice of the body, which is to say the soul. Because here, though in a veiled manner, she often reveals herself."

--Dante, Convivio, The Banquet (NOTE: Translation, structure and punctuation may be imperfect. If you know these Dante quotes and can produce it, please send it to me)

-This staggering work is a moving and awe-inspiring synthesis of the major life-long preoccupations Da Vinci held dear: philosophically, scientifically, artistically, anatomically, sexually, familial, mathematically, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. And it can be considered a culmination of all his life's work as one sustained vision, constantly altering its character and dimension for the viewer, a perpetual enigmatic metamorphosis or stream-of-consciousness to behold.
-It is no wonder that Da Vinci apparently kept the Mona Lisa for the rest of his life, unwilling to part with it. It is speculated that he continued to refine it into its current state until his death. Perhaps he kept making the subtle changes necessary to achieve such a complex embodiment, his complete vision, his final culminating synthesis. Where one figure can be depicted against a landscape, and the whole of his art, his studies, his philosophy, his life and personality can be unveiled at once without any story or action present; an ultimate in artistry and expression of being.

FULL VIEW - LARGE - HIGH QUALITY: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...a_Lisa.PNG
FULL VIEW - VERY LARGE: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...ris%29.jpg
IMAGE - MUSEE DU LOUVRE, PARIS, FRANCE: https://www.wmagazine.com/wp-content/up...p;w=1536px
MONA LISA - DIGITAL RESTORATION: https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3343/358...7319_o.jpg
MONA LISA - DIGITAL RESTORATION - LARGE: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...onardo.jpg
MONA LISA SUPERIMPOSED WITH ANDREA SALAI'S FACE:
MONA LISA SUPERIMPOSED WITH DA VINCI'S "ST JOHN THE BAPTIST": http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0yhVo-TfeQg/T...l3john.jpg
COMPARISON - Da Vinci's Mona Lisa to an "exact" copy by his assistant who would have painted his alongside him and copied his every stroke: http://www.experimental-psychology.de/c...2times.jpg
Notice how clearly this shows the changes Da Vinci made to her face. His assistant's version depicts Gherardini in a prettier, much more feminine light, while Da Vinci made her look more masculine -- presumably after the original execution of the work. His assistant, who was a pro, couldn't have been that far off.
COMPARISON - In the 16th century, famous art historian Giorgio Vasari wrote: “Leonardo undertook to execute, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife; and after toiling over it for four years, he left it unfinished….” And then Vasari attributed to the portrait some characteristics that don’t quite line up with the famous painting hanging in the Louvre today — “rosy and pearly tints,” eyes that had a “lustre and watery sheen which are always seen in life,” a nose “with its beautiful nostrils, rosy and tender.” Does this sound like it's describing the Mona Lisa we're so familiar with today? Not really? Recently, another painting was discovered that has't yet proven to be an original Da Vinci (but it seems probable), now being called the Isleworth Mona Lisa, which may have been painted earlier than the present day version as a precursor to it. It looks incomplete and better matches the beauty described by Vasari. Seeing the difference between the two further demonstrates the plausibility of the theory that Da Vinci later made several major changes to the work in order to create his true vision. See the comparison here: http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/...-merge.jpg
GOLDEN RATIO: http://media.tumblr.com/c7971955d6d39da...s740mf.jpg
SACRED GEOMETRY, INCLUDING "ISLEWORTH MONA LISA": https://artislimited.files.wordpress.co...ometry.jpg
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