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A Life in Six Masterpieces
August 2014
On Sale: July 22, 2014
448 pages ISBN: 1451678746 EAN: 9781451678741 Kindle: B00HB62M66 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
The life of one of the most revolutionary artists in
history, told through the story of six of his greatest
masterpieces. Among the immortals—Leonardo, Rembrandt,
Picasso—Michelangelo stands alone as a master of painting,
sculpture, and architecture. He was not only the greatest
artist in an age of giants, but a man who reinvented the
practice of art itself. Throughout his long career he
clashed with patrons by insisting that he had no master but
his own demanding muse and promoting the novel idea that it
was the artist, rather than the lord who paid for it, who
was creative force behind the work. Miles Unger narrates the astonishing life of this driven and
difficult man through six of his greatest masterpieces. Each
work expanded the expressive range of the medium, from the
Pietà Michelangelo carved as a brash young man, to
the apocalyptic Last Judgment, the work of an old man
tested by personal trials. Throughout the course of his
career he explored the full range of human possibility. In
the gargantuan David he depicts Man in the glory of
his youth, while in the tombs he carved for the Medici he
offers a sustained meditation on death and the afterlife. In
the Sistine Chapel ceiling he tells the epic story of
Creation, from the perfection of God’s initial procreative
act to the corruption introduced by His imperfect children.
In the final decades of his life, his hands too unsteady to
wield the brush and chisel, he exercised his mind by raising
the soaring vaults and dome of St. Peter’s in a final
tribute to his God. A work of deep artistic understanding, Miles Unger’s
Michelangelo brings to life the irascible,
egotistical, and undeniably brilliant man whose artistry
continues to amaze and inspire us after 500 years.
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