BOOK'S BACK COVER

"MICHELANGELO SCULPTOR OF HIS SALVATION"

BOOK'S BACK COVER - TEXT:

Michelangelo was given the gift of beauty in childbirth. By the wet nurse, daughter and wife of stonecutters, was given the means to achieve beauty: sculpture.

With Domenico Ghirlandaio he learned the rudiments of fresco painting and in the Medici court those of sculpture, with Bertoldo.

In the Academy of San Marcos, under the patronage and artistic paternity of Lorenzo the Magnificent was formed in the Neoplatonic philosophy next to Marsilio Ficino and Pico Della Mirandola and learned about the classic antiquity next to the poet Angelo Poliziano.

He has his first conversion when sculpting his Saint Peter Basilica's Pietà. Where appears the influence of The Paradise of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.

The second conversion is when he meets Vittoria Colonna, the intellectual, poet and pious aristocrat of the sixteenth century,  To her friend's death he enters in a deep introspective crisis, to which corresponds his Pietà Duomo. From which its process of conversion is accentuated and the perfect beauty of the form is transformed into perfect beauty of the spirit. Sculptural testimonies of this process are the fragment of the movement of his religious thought that is the Palestrina Pietà and it continues into the Rondanini Pietà, celestial ascension of the divine Michelangelo.