FLORENCE – Plans were presented in Florence on Tuesday to mark the 450th anniversaries of the death of Michelangelo and the founding of the Accademia delle Belle Arti that houses his David sculpture. Michelangelo Buonarroti died on February 18, 1564, at the venerable age of 89. The year before, Cosimo I de’ Medici founded the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, known by its current title as the Accademia delle Belle Arti (Academy of Fine Arts).
The city of Florence will mark these anniversaries with a two-year cultural program including exhibitions and an international conference dedicated to Michelangelo, to be held in Palazzo Vecchio. The program has opened on January 30 at the Accademia, which will be entirely open to the public for the first time.
Though not of Florentine origin, Michelangelo spent his formative years studying and working in the Tuscan city before moving to Venice, Bologna and then finally Rome.
It was at the turn of the 16th century that Michelangelo created, in his loved Florence, one of his two most famous works, David.
The Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence
The Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence
Because of the nature of the hero that it represented, it soon came to symbolize the defense of civil liberties embodied in the Florentine Republic, an independent city-state threatened on all sides by more powerful rival states and by the hegemony of the Medici family. The eyes of David, with a warning glare, were turned towards Rome.
It took a committee of 30 Florentine citizens that comprised many artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, to decide on an appropriate site for David.
In Autumn 1504 the Florentines witnessed the exceptional event: after four days traveling around the city, transported inside a wooden cage, Michelangelo’s David finally reached its destination, next to the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio (the city hall) and stayed there for centuries. Then in 1873 David was moved to the Accademia Gallery, and later replaced at the original location by a replica.
The Florence where Michelangelo was born was a city empowered by art and beauties. A leading spot of that amazing time we call the Renaissance. The cultural supremacy of Florence, and Italy, was represented, decade after decade and century after century, by incomparable artists such as Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Nevertheless, we can only try to imagine the immense surprise and marvel the Florentines were hit by as the Michelangelo’s “Giant” was uncovered.
But Michelangelo was not done. His legacy could not stop there.
Just a few years after David, called in Rome from the Pope, Michelangelo produced the other extraordinary piece of his art, one of the world’s (if not “the world’s”) most iconic pieces of art, as it is often recalled, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which has celebrated its 500th anniversary in November.
British Art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon writes in his book “Michelanglo and the Sistine Chapel,” that the artist did not want to paint the 12,000-square-foot ceiling, which is 68 feet high, because he thought it was a ruse by his enemies to get him to fail on a grand stage. “As they well knew he was a sculptor, not a painter, and would be bound to make a fool of himself,” Graham-Dixon wrote.
“He kept turning it down saying ‘I’m not a painter; I’m a sculptor,’” said Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, a Georgetown University professor who has studied the work extensively.
Well, a painter or a sculpture, he created something that seems to go well beyond human imagination.
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