Blog #4 (Chapter 19-20 Italy)

Michelangelo, Pieta and David
This week my blog has to focus on sculpture, as I have just completed my first sculpture after 7 months of work. My all time favorite artist in the field of sculpture is Michelangelo, and my favorite 2 sculptures are David and Pieta. Michelangelo completed the Pieta in one year when he was just 25 years old. One year later, he began the commission from the city of Florence for the statue David. This sculpture took him 3 years to complete. When you look closely at these 2 statues you will see something that very few if any artists before were able to capture, the precise musculature of the people being represented. When he was around 17 years old, Michelangelo was permitted to perform autopsies on the corpses at a local church hospital in Florence at night. Here he studied and learned anatomy, and from those studies was able to accurately represent the bone and muscle structure on his subjects in his sculpture and painting. Prior artists often draped their subjects in clothing that hid most of their body, making it easier to represent them without having to accurately represent their bodies. In these earlier works, if the body is shown naked, many would represent the muscles as rounded or soften groups of muscles, devoid of the accompanying tendons and veins. Michelangelo’s statues are so convincing in their representation of the muscle groups that it is as if the statue was really a body covered in white paint! Michelangelo carved the Pieta as a tomb monument for a French cardinal and is installed in the Vatican in Rome. He intended it to be viewed by onlookers up close, so you can stare directly into the sweet face of the Virgin holding her son Jesus. But a mentally disturbed man attacked the statue in 1972, and since then it can only be viewed behind barriers that are about 2l-0-30 feet away from the statue, making it hard to experience the statue as it was intended. The thing I personally find most fascinating about Michelangelo’s style of sculpture is contained in a quote from a sonnet that he wrote, “The greatest artist has no conception which a single block of marble does not potentially contain within its mass, but only a hand obedient to the mind can penetrate to this image” Michelangelo was able to see the Pieta and David contained within the block of marble that he carefully chose from the marble quarry in Carrara, Italy. He then “liberated” the statue from the stone!



This week, I completed my first sculpture. The title of my sculpture is “Flying Mandolin”. I worked for 7 months on creating the mandolin out of steel sheets and wire rods. I learned how to use cutting machines, TIG and MIG welders, and all sorts of files and grinders for finishing work. I then learned how to carve Alabaster, in the old style with hammer and chisels, to create the open mandolin case from which my steel mandolin is flying forth. It took far longer to create than could have imagined, but it was a very rewarding process from start to finish.