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Michelangelo’s Legacy He left many works incomplete: his last Pietà, for example, and St Peter’s, which was continued by Bernini and Carlo Maderno. Unlike any previous artist, Michelangelo was the subject of two biographies in his own lifetime. In 1546 Vasari began writing his “lives”, finishing the first edition in 1550. The only living artist to be honoured with inclusion in this work was Michelangelo, a dubious honour, according to the latter, who commissioned one of his pupils to write another one, which was published in 1553. It was meant to correct some of the errors which Michelangelo claimed to have found in Vasari’s work and to shift the emphasis which the latter had given in a more favourable direction. Vasari, as time went on, became more and more friendly with Michelangelo, becoming his most devoted admirer, so that the very long life which appears in the second edition of the “Lives” in 1568, soon after Michelangelo's death, gives us the most complete biography of any artist up to that time and is a wonderful guide to the feelings of his contemporaries about the man who can lay claim to be the greatest sculptor, painter and draughtsman of all time, as well as a great architect and poet, a true genius. Fresco was his preferred painting technique and marble his main material for sculpture. He despised oil-painting as effeminate, though the now authenticated unfinished Entombment of Christ at the National Gallery in London is in oil over a tempera base while The Doni Tondo is in tempera. In sculpture, his method was to outline his figure on the front of the block and to “liberate the figure imprisoned in the marble”, by working steadily in. The four abandoned Slaves intended for a later version of Julius II's tomb, now at the Florence Academia, provide examples of his direct carving technique and his consistent use of various sizes of claw chisel. No models exist for any paintings or frescoes, and only one cartoon, in the British Museum in London, has survived. Other works of his are to be found in Florence, at the Bargello, at Santo Spirito, at the Casa Buonarroti and at Palazzo Vecchio; in Siena; in Rome, at Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and in St Petersburg, at The Hermitage Museum. There are also some 500 drawings by him, the majority of which are in Royal Collection at Windsor, at the Casa Buonarroti and in Paris. |