Michael Angelo Buonarroti: With Translations of the Life of the Master by His Scholar, Ascanio Condivi, and Three Dialogues from the Portugese by Francisco D'ollanda

Michelangelo Buonarroti was the first artist in history to be the subject of a biography published during his own lifetime. When Giorgio Vasari published his Lives of the Artists in 1550, placing Michelangelo as the divine culmination of all art, the master was incensed. So incensed, in fact, that he urged his close friend and fellow painter Ascanio Condivi to write a rival account an account the aging artist himself reviewed and approved. The result is the most intimate portrait we will ever have of artistic genius in its prime: not the mythological figure Vasari constructed, but a living, breathing, swearing, tormented man who carved David from a block of marble others had abandoned and painted the Sistine Chapel until his eyes failed him. This edition presents Charles Holroyd's long-unavailable translation of Condivi's Life, supplemented by three dialogues on painting from the Portuguese artist Francisco D'ollanda and forty-nine pages of illustrations, including drawings from the British Museum. For anyone seeking to understand how Renaissance art actually got made in the treacherous world of Papal commissions and Italian wars, this remains indispensable.