Between Michelangelo and Petrarch: Shakespeare's Sonnets of Art

John Kerrigan, St John's College, Cambridge

The year 1494 found Michelangelo in Bologna: young, brash, and full of promise. Behind him lay his first major work, the Madonna of the Steps, a low relief carved with all the delicate solidity of Donatello, though left—like so many of Michelangelo's most emotional compositions—unfinished. Before him lay Rome, and a whole series of sculptural triumphs: the Bacchus, the Pietà, the bronze and marble Davids of 1501-2, and the first designs for the Julius tomb. But, for twelve months or so, the young artist stayed in Bologna, at the house of Gianfrancesco Aldrovandi, carving very little, yet drawing, writing and reading. Michelangelo had already encountered—in the circle of Lorenzo de' Medici—Ficino, Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola; and he must have absorbed, during those years in Florence, the neoplatonic...

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