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Michelangelo

A Life in Six Masterpieces

Miles J. Unger

$29.99

Paperback

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English
Simon & Schuster
01 September 2015
Among the immortals - Leonardo, Rembrandt, Picasso - Michelangelo stands alone as a master of painting, sculpture, and architecture. He was not only the greatest artist in an age of giants, but a man who reinvented the practice of art itself. Throughout his long career he clashed with patrons by insisting that he had no master but his own demanding muse and promoting the novel idea that it was the artist, rather than the lord who paid for it, who was creative force behind the work.

Miles Unger narrates the astonishing life of this driven and difficult man through six of his greatest masterpieces. Each work expanded the expressive range of the medium, from the Pieta Michelangelo carved as a brash young man, to the apocalyptic Last Judgment, the work of an old man tested by personal trials. Throughout the course of his career he explored the full range of human possibility. In the gargantuan David he depicts Man in the glory of his youth, while in the tombs he carved for the Medici he offers a sustained meditation on death and the afterlife.  In the Sistine Chapel ceiling he tells the epic story of Creation, from the perfection of God's initial procreative act to the corruption introduced by His imperfect children. In the final decades of his life, his hands too unsteady to wield the brush and chisel, he exercised his mind by raising the soaring vaults and dome of St. Peter's in a final tribute to his God.

A work of deep artistic understanding, Miles Unger's Michelangelo brings to life the irascible, egotistical, and undeniably brilliant man whose artistry continues to amaze and inspire us after 500 years.

By:  
Imprint:   Simon & Schuster
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 235mm,  Width: 156mm,  Spine: 28mm
Weight:   445g
ISBN:   9781451678789
ISBN 10:   1451678789
Pages:   448
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Miles J. Unger is an art historian and journalist. Formerly the managing editor of Art New England, he served for many years as a contributing writer to The New York Times. In addition to Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces, he is the author of The Watercolors of Winslow Homer, Magnifico: The Brilliant Life and Violent Times of Lorenzo de' Medici, and Machiavelli: A Biography.

Reviews for Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces

Unger insightfully guides readers through both Michelangelo's life and the culture and history of the times. . . . [He] displays keen, humane judgments in interpreting Michelangelo's life by focusing on his motives and talent. The artist's life was complicated, but Unger finds a narrative path that keeps the reader on course for an enlightened biography. --David Hendricks San Antonio Express


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