The greatest of Renaissance sculptors was Michelangelo.
Though a Florentine by birth, he lived in Rome and made that city a center of
Italian art. A colossal statue of David, who looks like a Greek athlete, and
another of Moses, seated and holding the table of the law, are among his
best-known works. Michelangelo also won fame in architecture and painting. The
dome of St. Peter's was finished after his designs. Having been commissioned by
one of the popes to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine chapel [12] in the Vatican,
he painted a series of scenes which presented the Biblical story from the
Creation to the Flood. These frescoes are unequaled for sublimity and power. On
the end wall of the same chapel Michelangelo produced his fresco of the
"Last Judgment," one of the most famous paintings in the world.
[12] In this chapel the election of a new pope takes
place.
RISE OF ITALIAN PAINTING
The early Italian painters contented themselves, at first,
with imitating Byzantine mosaics and enamels. Their work exhibited little
knowledge of human anatomy: faces might be lifelike, but bodies were too
slender and out of proportion. The figures of men and women were posed in stiff
and conventional attitudes. The perspective also was false: objects which the
painter wished to represent in the background were as near as those which he wished
to represent in the foreground. In the fourteenth century, however, Italian
painting abandoned the Byzantine style; achieved beauty of form, design, and
color to an extent hitherto unknown; and became at length the supreme art of
the Renaissance.
