The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (313 page)

mezzotint
.

A method of engraving that produces tonal areas rather than lines; the term also applies to a print made by this method. A metal (usually copper) plate is roughened with a tool called a rocker, which raises a ‘burr’ on the surface. The design is formed by scraping away the burr where the light tones are required and by polishing the metal quite smooth in the highlights. When the plate has been inked and then wiped, the ink is retained where the plate is rough and will print an intense black, but where it has been smoothed less ink is held and a lighter tone occurs. Mezzotint was invented in the Netherlands in the mid 17th cent. by Ludwig von
Siegen
and soon spread to England, where it became an extremely popular method for reproducing portraits in particular. Its heyday was the 18th cent., but memorable use was made of it in the following century by John
Martin
, one of the few artists who made original creative use of the medium rather than reproducing someone else's design. Like
drypoint
, mezzotint yields only a small number of good impressions before the burr wears down. The technique became virtually extinct in the later 19th century with the development of photographic methods of reproduction.

 
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(1796–1822).
French landscape painter, the first artist to win the
Prix de Rome
in the Historical Landscape category that was established in 1817. He was a pupil of
David
and
Valenciennes
and in his turn taught
Corot
, who was influenced by his severe compositions and cool colour harmonies.

 
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(1763–1843).
French landscape painter. Michel was a picture restorer at the
Louvre
and was strongly influenced by 17th-cent. Dutch landscape painters. He was one of the earliest to paint in the open air (see
PLEIN AIR
) and because of this and his intimate, emotional depiction of nature he has sometimes been regarded as a forerunner of the
Barbizon School
.

 
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(1475–1564).
Florentine sculptor, painter, architect, draughtsman, and poet, one of the greatest figures of the
Renaissance
and, in his later years, one of the forces that shaped
Mannerism
. His father, a member of the gentry, claimed noble lineage and throughout his life Michelangelo was touchy on the subject; pride of birth had much to do with the family opposition to his apprenticeship as a painter as well as with Michelangelo's own insistence in later life on the status of painting and sculpture among the
liberal arts
. In 1488 he was apprenticed for a term of three years to Domenico
Ghirlandaio
and from him he must have learnt the elements of
fresco
technique. He could not have learnt very much else, however, since he seems to have transferred very quickly to the school set up in the
Medici
gardens and run by
Bertoldo di Giovanni
. More important than either master, however, was what he learned from the drawings he made of figures in the frescos of
Giotto
and
Masaccio
. After the death of his patron Lorenzo de Medici in 1492 the political situation in Florence deteriorated, and in October 1494 Michelangelo left for Bologna, where he carved three small figures for the tomb of S. Dominic (see
NICCOLÒ DELL' ARCA
). By June 1496 he was in Rome, where he remained for the next five years and where he carved the two statues that established his fame—the
Bacchus
(Bargello, Florence,
c.
1496–7) and the
Pietà
(St Peter's, Rome, 1498–9). The latter is the masterpiece of his early years—a tragically expressive and yet beautiful and harmonious solution to the problem of representing a full-grown man lying dead in the lap of a woman. There are no marks of suffering—as were common in northern representations of the period—and the carving has a flawless beauty and polish demonstrating his absolute technical mastery. Still in his mid-twenties, Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1501 to consolidate the reputation he had made in Rome. He remained there until the spring of 1505, the major completed work of the period being the
David
(Accademia, Florence, 1501–4), which has become a symbol of Florence and Florentine art. Soon after the
David
was completed, Michelangelo received a commission from the Signoria of Florence to paint a huge mural of the
Battle of Cascina
for the new Council Chamber in the Palazzo Vecchio; here he worked in rivalry with
Leonardo
, who was engaged on the
Battle of Anghiari
for the same room. Neither painting was completed, but Michelangelo began work on the full-size
cartoon
in the winter of 1504, and the fragment known as the
Bathers
was, while it existed, a model for all the young artists in Florence—including
Raphael
—and was one of the prime causes of Mannerist preoccupation with the nude figure in violent action. It is now known from a copy (Earl of Leicester coll.) and an engraving, as well as some preliminary drawings (for example in the BM).
Michelangelo left the battlepiece unfinished when Pope Julius II summoned him to Rome in 1505 to make him a tomb. Julius died in 1513, but the project dragged on until 1545 and was rightly described by
Condivi
as the ‘Tragedy of the Tomb’. It was originally conceived on the most grandiose scale, but was whittled down in successive contracts with Julius's heirs, and of the monument finally erected in S. Pietro in Vincoli in 1545 only the celebrated
Moses
(
c.
1515) was from Michelangelo's own hand. (Two figures of
Slaves
,
c.
1513, carved by Michelangelo for the tomb are now in the Louvre.) The other great work commissioned from Michelangelo by Julius —the frescoing of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—was equally daunting, but was brought to sublime fruition. The contract was signed on 10 May 1508 and the finished ceiling was unveiled on 31 October 1512. Michelangelo, who always regarded himself as a sculptor first and foremost, was reluctant to undertake the work, but he made of it his most heroic achievement, not only for its quality as a work of art, but also in terms of the endurance and stamina he showed in completing so quickly and virtually unaided such a huge and physically uncomfortable task. There is still much debate about the exact interpretation of the scores of figures that adorn the ceiling, but the main panels represent scenes from Genesis, from the Creation to the Drunkenness of Noah, forming the background to the frescos on the life of Moses and of Christ on the walls below by a number of 15th-cent. artists. Prophets and Sibyls who foretold Christ's birth are at the sides of the ceiling, and at each corner of the central scenes are figures of beautiful nude youths (usually called the
Ignudi
), whose exact significance is uncertain. They have been thought to represent the Neoplatonic ideal of humanity, and as Kenneth
Clark
wrote, ‘Their physical beauty is an image of divine perfection; their alter and vigorous movements an expression of divine energy.’ From the moment of its completion the Ceiling has always been regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of pictorial art (the recent cleaning has revealed anew the beauty of the colouring), and Michelangelo was, at the age of 37, recognized as the greatest artist of his day, a position he retained unchallenged until his death.
In December 1516 he was commissioned by the new pope, Leo X (Giovanni de' Medici ), to design a façade for the Medici parish church in Florence, S. Lorenzo , which had been left unfinished by
Brunelleschi
. The project came to nothing and wasted a good deal of Michelangelo's time, but it led to two other works for S. Lorenzo —the Medici Chapel, or New Sacristy, planned as a counterpart to Brunelleschi's Old Sacristy, and the Biblioteca Laurenziana. Both were left unfinished, but they nevertheless rank among Michelangelo's finest creations. The Medici Chapel was planned from November 1520 as a mortuary chapel for the family to contain the monuments of four members, but it was abandoned when the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1527, restarted in 1530, and left incomplete in 1534 when Michelangelo finally settled in Rome. It was intended to be a union of architecture and sculpture (like the projected S. Lorenzo façade), with the view from the altar leading to the climax of the whole composition in the figures of the
Madonna and Child
(unfinished) and with the Active and Contemplative Life symbolized by figures on the wall-tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici. The figures of the Medici are set above reclining figures symbolizing
Day
and
Night
(for
Vita activa
) and
Dawn
and
Evening
(for
Vita contemplativa
).
In the thirty years that remained to him in Rome, Michelangelo worked mainly for the papacy. He was at once commissioned to paint the
Last Judgement
in the Sistine Chapel and began the actual painting in 1536. It was unveiled on 31 October 1541, twenty-nine years to the day after the unveiling of the Sistine Ceiling but a whole world away from it in feeling and meaning, with its massive and menacing figures and mood of wrathful desolation. In the interval the world of Michelangelo's youth had collapsed in the horror of the Sack of Rome (1527), and its confident humanism had been found insufficient in the face of the rise of Protestantism and the new, militant spirit of the Counter-Reformation. For Paul III (Alessandro
Farnese
), who commissioned the Last Judgement, Michelangelo also executed his last works in painting, the
Conversion of St Paul and the Crucifixion of St Peter
(1542–50), frescos in the Cappella Paolina in the Vatican. The figures here are even more blunt, heavy, and unconcerned with physical allure, totally repudiating his own early ideals. Something of the same deep and troubled spirituality is seen in his late drawings of the Crucifixion and two sculptures of the Pietà. One (now in Florence Cathedral) was intended for his own tomb and contains a self-portrait as Nicodemus; it was begun
c.
1546 and mutilated and abandoned by Michelangelo in 1555. The other (Castello Sforza, Milan) was his last work, left unfinished at his death.
For the last thirty years of his life, however, Michelangelo devoted most of his attentions to architecture, and in this field his stature is just as great as in sculpture and painting. His most important commission—indeed the most important in Christendom—was the completion of St Peter's, which had been begun under Julius II in 1506. When Michelangelo became architect in 1546, the building had advanced little since
Bramante's
death in 1514. As with the Sistine Ceiling, he was initially unwilling to undertake the task, but he then proceeded with formidable energy and by the time of his death work had advanced so far that the drum of the dome was nearly complete. Michelangelo also designed the dome itself, but this was executed after his death and is probably a good deal steeper in outline than he intended. The addition of a long nave in the early 17th cent. altered Michelangelo's plan for a centralized church, but nevertheless the exterior of the building owes more to him than to any other architect and forms a fitting conclusion to his titanic career. In architecture, Michelangelo's decorative vocabulary soon attained widespread currency, but it was only in the 17th cent., however, that his massive and dynamic style was fully appreciated and emulated; it is fitting that
Bernini
, the great sculptor-architect of the age, should complete St Peter's with his glorious piazza. In painting and sculpture Michelangelo's means of expression was limited almost entirely to the heroic male figure, usually nude, but in this field he reigned supreme as no artist has done before or since. The awe that his contemporaries felt for him has not diminished through the centuries and his influence, for good and ill, has been enormous.