Michelangelo's Unfinished Sculptures

when an artist is often referred to as the greatest of all time when they create some of the most iconic and praised works of art ever and are separated from our time by hundreds of years it's easy to assign to them a kind of divinity they don't make mistakes their projects never fall through but of course being human this artist was flawed and they were as subject to the same limitations as any of us perhaps the most accomplished and praised artists of the italian renaissance michelangelo bunarati was if it really needs saying a genius you simply don't create some of the most famous imagery on the planet by accident he was still no stranger to failure but he could often turn failure around such as taking an enormous but quite thin block of flawed marble that had been left in florentine workshops for 40 years and eventually turning it into the statue of david evidence of the bloc's thinness can be seen by his relatively slim build and let's just say unimpressive backside when michelangelo was assigned by pope julius ii to paint the ceiling of the sistine chapel he considered himself more of a sculptor than a painter so working in fresco at this scale and with such an irregular surface was a bit of a daunting task and for a while he struggled when working on the ceiling he described himself as enduring stupendous labors and a thousand anxieties he had to redo large sections of it because of the fickle nature of the wet plaster once the first few scenes were done and once the scaffolding was removed he looked up and as you can see the first three sections were quite hard to read the figures were simply too small and so a new approach was taken enlarging the figures and reducing their numbers which gave us some of the most iconic images of all time but things didn't always work out one project a game commissioned by pope julius ii was so disastrous it was coined the tragedy of the tomb by one of michelangelo's biographers the original project was supposed to be a three-story tall freestanding tomb with over 40 figures it was incredibly ambitious perhaps too ambitious michelangelo was initially so invested in the project that he spent eight months simply quarrying the marble until funds were cut off and pope julius ii sent him on a different mission painting the ceiling of the sistine chapel shortly after the ceiling's completion pope julius ii died so clearly there was a bit more urgency to complete the thing he resumed work on the tomb this time carving the moses and two other slave statues until the tomb was placed on hold again the tomb was redesigned several times removing more and more statues and shrinking again and again for 40 years until it became what it is now a mere wall tomb with the statue of moses placed kind of awkwardly in the middle and with several sculptures on the upper level absolutely not carved by michelangelo the best part is it's not even a tomb but more of a funerary monument the body of pope julius ii is currently buried in saint peter's basilica behind a floor slab if it was finished according to the original plan it might have been as famous and world-renowned as david or the pieta or even the sistine chapel ceiling when the tomb came to its anti-climactic end i imagine michelangelo was both glad the project was finally finished even if it was not what it could have been and disappointed in the end result once he lamented i lost the whole of my youth chained to this tomb i think we can all attest to a big exciting project that became a shadow of what was originally planned although the project was more or less an unmitigated disaster it did give us some interesting residue only a few of those 40 figures were ever finished and a notable 4 were left unfinished which are now displayed at the academy of florence the same place as the statue of david these figures are often referred to as the slaves or the prisoners they were meant to be caryatids of sorts anthropomorphic columns meant to flank the walls but serving no structural role the first titled the young slave has his arm covering his face while half the head rests in his stony oversized hand the second titled the bearded slave is probably the most finished of the four his bottom hand is also an oversized blocky mess that melts into his thigh the third the awakening slave is in a writhing position it's unnerving to imagine him trying to twist his body out of the stone without the use of his hands seeing as they are useless lumps the last atlas probably my favorite may be the most incomplete its title is apt and i can also imagine the big block of overhanging stone belonging to a classical pyramid head type creature when i look at these sculptures the first thing i want to do is well stretch they really are prisoners giorgio vasari once wrote the statues looked as though they were surfacing from a pool of water it's hard not to think about the history of these unfinished works when you are looking at those chisel marks you're looking at the raw process of an artist from 500 years ago it's hard to imagine that this caliber of sculpture can emerge from just stone especially without modern tools these unfinished works give us a glimpse into that hidden process they show raw stone directly next to dynamic complicated musculature and hair it is often said michelangelo could see the figure imprisoned in the block and i guess he could in a sense because he had a lot of knowledge experience and preparation not because he had some sort of superpower and this did not stop him from making errors he was always leaving enough extra stone anticipating changes carving in marvel is a permanent subtractive unforgiving medium and was and is tremendously difficult even for michelangelo although a neat metaphor to say he was actually liberating the sculpture from imprisonment in the block by simply removing excess material as it is commonly said is inaccurate the slaves show he would carve in one direction either from one face of the marble to the other face or from corner to corner in a way perhaps intentionally or unintentionally creating an optimum angle from which to view it there's some claims that michelangelo left these intentionally unfinished as some sort of commentary on the art process or to show the eternal struggle of human beings to free themselves from the bonds and physical weight of the matter this is almost certainly untrue when you take in the wider context it becomes abundantly clear michelangelo was overworked not trying to make a statement it's easy to believe they are intentional when removed from their context they're kind of eerie and their names certainly don't help these trapped human forms seem like they could easily represent the subjects of an ancient myth where some vengeful god punishes these poor souls by partially entrapping them in stone although perhaps only related in a superficial way henry matisse's relief bronze sculptures the back series fascinates me similarly the faceless figure becomes more and more abstracted getting less defined and disappearing further and further into the shape of the wall it has that same unnerving effect illustrating a being trapped at the threshold between raw material and human form there are other sculptures that are unfinished from michelangelo before michelangelo completed david he was commissioned to start working on 12 marble apostles for a cathedral but only saint matthew was ever started and was left unfinished because he was distracted by a commission to again work for pope julius ii again here you can see how he worked carving from one face of the stone directly to the other leaving things unfinished was a major theme in michelangelo's life he often grossly underestimated the time it took to finish his works and if it wasn't by his own hand projects would frequently never come to fruition because of outside factors late in his career michelangelo would complete fewer and fewer sculptures completing only three in the last three decades of his life giorgio vasari wrote in the life of michelangelo that as soon as he had found a small error in a figure he led it alone and took up another block thinking he would not experience the same fortune jurgen scholes has estimated that nearly three-fifths of his sculptures remained unfinished according to vasari before michelangelo's death he burned a great number of his designs and sketches in order that no one should perceive his labors and the efforts of his genius that he might not appear less than perfect clearly if there was ever an appropriate time to use this phrase perfection was the enemy of the good although it is tragic so much work was either lost or unfinished i think many modern artists can find a sort of comfort in these anecdotes 99 of art is the process and there's no getting around it even to those who enjoy the making of art there comes a time when things just get tedious when you both want the process to end but you just can't seem to call it finished artists have struggled for all of time and no matter how much of a genius you are the process of art is just as important as the results so here's to finishing things even if they aren't perfect and if they aren't finished but still interesting then that works too you

Channel: Solar Sands

Views: 208,451

Rating: 4.9852738 out of 5

Keywords: Michelangelo, Solar Sands, Drawing, Drawings, Art, Sculpture, Art History

Id: RV7Zqd9OPq8

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021