Michaelangelo

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second level was to have statues of
Moses and Saint Paul as well as symbolic figures of the active and contemplative life-
representative of the human striving for, and reception of, knowledge. The third level, it
is assumed, was to have an effigy of the deceased pope. The tomb of Pope Julius II was
never finished. What was finished of the tomb represents a twenty-year span of frustrating
delays and revised schemes. Michelangelo had hardly begun work on the pope’s tomb
when Julius commanded him to fresco the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to complete the
work done in the previous century under Sixtus IV. The overall organization consists of
four large triangles at the corner; a series of eight triangular spaces on the outer border; an
intermediate series of figures; and nine central panels, all bound together with architectural
motifs and nude male figures. The corner triangles depict heroic action in the Old
Testament, while the other eight triangles depict the ...

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chapel off limits to anyone save himself, until the painting was
completed. The many nude figures are referred to as Ignudi. They are naked humans,
perhaps representing the naked truth. More likely, I think they represent Michelangelo’s
concept of the human potential for perfection. Michelangelo himself said, “Whoever
strives for perfection is striving for something divine.” In painting nude humans, he is
suggesting the unfinished human; each of us is born nude with a mind and a body, in
Neoplatonic thought, with the power to be our own shapers. Michelangelo has a very
great personality for his time. In Rome, in 1536, Michelangelo was at work on the Last
Judgment for the ...

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