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Michelangelo's Last Paintings

Leo Steinberg

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Michelangelo's Last Paintings

For half a century, Steinberg delved into Michelangelo's work, revealing the symbolic structures underlying the artist's highly charged idiom. This volume of essays and unpublished lectures elucidates many of Michelangelo's paintings, from frescoes in the Sistine Chapel to the Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter, the artist's lesser-known works in the Vatican's Pauline Chapel; also included is a study of the relationship of the Doni Madonna to Leonardo. Steinberg's perceptions evolved from long, hard looking. Almost everything he wrote included passages of old-fashioned formal analysis, but always put into the service of interpretation. He understood that Michelangelo's rendering of figures, as well as their gestures and interrelations, conveys an emblematic significance masquerading under the guise of naturalism. Michelangelo pushed Renaissance naturalism into the furthest reaches of metaphor, using the language of the body to express fundamental Christian tenets once expressible only by poets and preachers.

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Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Year
2019
ISBN-13
9780226482439
Genre
Biography & Memoir
Topics
Michelangelo's paintingsRenaissance art historyReligious symbolism in art

Awards

Other awarded books from Leo Steinberg

  • Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art

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