Analysis Of Michelangelo's Madonna Of The Stairs

Painter, sculptor, architect, and poet Michelangelo, one of the most famous artists of the Italian Renaissance, was born Michelangelo di Ludovico Buonarroti Simoni on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, Italy. Michelangelo was the second of five sons to his father, Ludovico Buonarroti, and mother, Francesca di Neri di Miniato del Serra. Due to his mother’s illness, Michelangelo was entrusted to a wet nurse in Settignano who belonged to a family of stonemasons. He later joked, “With my wet nurse’s milk, I sucked in the hammer and chisels I use for my statues.” According to Michelangelo’s biographer Ascanio Condivi, who wrote under the guidance of the artist himself, it was this fact, together with his birth under the favor of Mercury and Venus that caused

Those two works are the Madonna of the Stairs and the Battle of the Centaurs. They are the earliest works that can be securely attributed to Michelangelo, at the age of sixteen. In them, he already displayed the stature of a mature artist. In Madonna of the Stairs, there is an explicit reference to Donatello; in Battle of the Centaurs, to classical sculpture. Their comparison, instead of leading to the conclusion that they are directly derived from these models, shows a deep assimilation and movement beyond them. We know that Michelangelo had lived for sometime with a stonecutter and his wife during his childhood. Perhaps his introduction into working with blocks of stone was far more intensive than we first imagined. Most artists have early work that can be used to chart the later development of their style, but the Madonna of the Stairs seems at first glance to be a fully mature piece of sculpture. The carving of the drapes half covering the infants head is indeed wonderfully executed. Perhaps Michelangelo did produce some inferior earlier work that has not survived or that he himself destroyed, whatever the reality may be, this stone masterpiece remains as a wonderfully realized, emotionally charged, piece of sculpture. The Battle of the Centaurs is a writhing mass of figures three-dimensionally carved into a marble block. The figures are layered in overlapping positions adding to the spacial depth of the work. We can see the artists interest in the massive bulk of the naked male form, a theme that would serve Michelangelo well in future commissions (Ragionieri