Novantiqua Records

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci.

Michelangelo's output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. As an architect, Michelangelo pioneered the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library. At 74 he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan, the western end being finished to Michelangelo's design, the dome being completed after his death with some modification.

In a demonstration of Michelangelo's unique standing, he was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. Two biographies were published of him during his lifetime; one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino ("the divine one"). One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.

Cd on Novantiqua:

• Michelangelo a Firenze

Till Ansgar Baumhauer
www.till-ansgar-baumhauer.de

Facing the personality of Carlo Gesualdo in his quality as artist and murderer, there was an importance in my artwork also to analyze the relations between aesthetics and violence or rather creative energy and destruction as well as the point when violence is aesthetified and, for that, not experienced any more as itself.
In the actual series of works „children´s songs“ this aspect is combined with life and work of the italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
In the „Swan´s song project“ I compare different ways of societally justified acts of self destruction (early Christian martyrdom, japanese Kamikaze, islamist Jihad and the baroque fictitious commonplace of death for love) and overlap them.

Cd on Novantiqua:

• Terre senz'Acqua