Paper Trail: Michelangelo in a New, Old Medium

“My beard points to heaven, and I feel the nape of my neck on my hump,” Michelangelo wrote in a poem about his experience painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “I bend my breast like a harpy’s, and, with nonstop dripping from above, my brush makes my face a richly decorated floor.” To accompany that poem, the artist sketched himself at work, stretching up to apply paint to the freshly applied plaster (detail shown above). In Michelangelo: A Life on Paper, Leonard Barkan, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, examines how Michelangelo—best known for timeless works chiseled from stone or painted on architectural surfaces—revealed his deepest self on that most fragile of media, paper. By following Michelangelo’s paper trail, Barkan discovers a more versatile artist of both pictures and words who seems more human and strikingly more modern than the Renaissance genius of legend. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Paper Trail."

[Many thanks to Princeton University Press for providing me with a review copy of Leonard Barkan’s Michelangelo: A Life on Paper.]

Eternal Life: Italian Mosaics of the First Christian Millenium

According to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, Domenico Ghirlandaio—whose frescoes graced the walls of the Sistine Chapel before those of his apprentice, Michelangelo—once called the art of mosaics as “vera pittura per l’eternita” or “true painting for eternity.” Joachim Poeschke’s Italian Mosaics: 300-1300 demonstrates the seemingly eternal life of these pre-Renaissance mosaics, which contain some of the earliest images of Christian art. In this first published survey of the subject, Poeschke analyzes how religion and politics teamed up to produce these glories of artistry in words while allowing stunning photographs of the mosaics to speak for themselves. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Eternal Life."

[Image: Enthroned Madonna and Child between Angels. Nave, north wall. Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy. Nave, Circa 500 and 560.]

[Many thanks to Abbeville Press for the image above and for a review copy of Italian Mosaics: 300-1300 by Joachim Poeschke.]

Rescue Mission: Saving Vasari’s “Last Supper” 45 Years After a Flood

When the Arno River overflowed in 1966 and flooded Florence, Italy, an art apocalypse nearly took place in that grand Renaissance city. Countless works, including Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Doors of Paradise, Donatello’s Magdalene, and a crucifix by Giovanni Cimabue, sustained serious damage from water and mud. Almost 45 years later, the rescue mission continues as conservation technology advances to a point at which it can finally restore some of these works to their original glory. Thanks to those advances, and to a €300,000 Getty Foundation grant awarded to Florence’s Opificio delle Pietre Dure e Laboratori di Restauro (OPD), Giorgio Vasari’s 1546 The Last Supper (detail shown) will undergo a 3-year resurrection to roll back the damage those rising floodwaters once caused. Vasari, author of the The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times and the original conservator of art history through his writing, finds his work the subject of one of the great conservation efforts in art history. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Rescue Mission."

Man of the Century

Quick Quiz: Who is the only artist to be named “man of the century”? Picasso? Did Demoiselles d'Avignon and Guernica preach love and peace to define the twentieth century? I wish they did, but, sadly, no. You have to go back all the way to the fourteenth century to find TIME Magazine’s “Man of the 14^th Century,” as named in their 1999 end-of-the-millennium roundup. By painting people three-dimensionally and more humanly than ever before, Giotto di Bondone started a revolution that no artist has equaled since. Will any, can any, ever top Giotto, who died on this date in 1337? (Giotto’s The Arrest of Christ, also known as The Kiss of Judas, one of the scenes of the life of Christ painted in the Cappella Scrovegni from 1304 through 1306, appears above.) Please click over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Man of the Century."